[Mini-Review] Super Monkey Ball Adventure
So this is why the monkeys never left those puzzle stages before.
Published: August 28, 2006
[The Good]
There's a line in the Jurassic Park movie (and, I'd imagine, the book, though it's been a while since I read that) where Jeff Goldblum's character, Ian Malcolm, chastises the scientists in the JP labs for charging ahead with cloning dinosaurs with a line like, "you were so busy worrying about whether or not you could that you didn't bother to ask yourselves if you should." That is, evidently, what went on with the development of Super Monkey Ball Adventure.
Can you make a game where the monkeys are ripped from their quaint little puzzle world and placed in a fairly-free roaming one with the same controls? Sure you can. Should TT Games (nee Traveller's Tales) have sought to remove the quirky little characters from their finish line dash for something far more expanded? Probably not.
But they did anyway, and the result is a game that is terribly frustrating to control, re-uses some of the more annoying aspects of the puzzle games (you can fall out of the world? Whaaa?), and ultimately just feels like a botched experiment that still somehow was green-lighted.
The puzzles are still here, tucked into the main adventure and used to open doors, but by nature of the fact that they weren't the focus, they feel sort of ham-fisted into the game. You'll notice plenty of inspiration from the original Super Monkey Ball games, but the imitation isn't always flattering, and rarely does it feel like the game really does the source material justice.
That I had more fun with the Party Games that are unlocked as you play though things than the actual main adventure says something about that main game, and some of them will be familiar to those that played the previous games. There are races, loaded with power-ups that slingshot you towards a winner, give you a little more oomph with your attack and so on; high-flying target practice/ski jump where momentum in landings plays a part (think the skydiving parts of Pilotwings... but with monkeys); a sort of monkey boxing game; a bouncing game where you attempt to hit all the jewels below to your color; a balloon collecting roll around a huge globe (sort of a take on Sonic 3's bonus rounds with better controls); and the fairly deep Monkey Cannon game where you fire monkey balls at an opponent's castle to try to get bricks which you use to power up your own castle.
It's not that the world that they created is terrible -- in point of fact, it's actually rather nice looking. The framerate is solid, the texture work certainly passable -- there's even a really cool effect where the screen tints black and white save for your character when you're near enemies called Naysayers. You've got plenty of characters to talk to, lots of variety in the five different worlds (islands) that you explore, and absolutely tons of bananas to collect should you be all obsessive-compulsive about stuff like that. The game is built like a platformer, slowly spoon feeding you powers and then introducing you to puzzles that utilize them so you get a nice sense of accomplishment.
[The Bad]
Unfortunately, you rarely do get a sense of accomplishment. Because of the open-ended nature of the worlds, things are meant to sort of ape (ho hoo!) the Metroidvania style of game where advancement past a certain point is blocked until you have the necessary upgrade to progress, but the clues as to what you'll need are often nowhere to be seen (or, more possibly, I was just too dense to see them). This can mean tons of lost time as you struggle to work through a world that feels like it was designed around a jump button but doesn't really have one. Loading times are kept to a minimum, but they're masked rather poorly by a handful of gates that you have to run around clumsily to load the next section.
That it was so hard for me to talk about the good parts of the game without throwing a "but this part..." section in there shows how hard the game is to love; for every thing that it does well, it does two other that just make it frustrating.
Nothing is more frustrating than just trying to get around, though. It's not just the controls, which feel overly touchy at times and horribly unresponsive when stuck in tight spaces, but the fact that the game relies so much on backtracking. Talking to other monkeys in the world gives you various missions, but if you do something as easy as falling out of the world, you have to run back and talk to them again to start the task all over. It leads to an overwhelming feeling of trial-and-error, and it sucks any remaining fun out of the game.
[The Verdict]
There's really not much to say here that hasn't already been said. It wasn't a wise move to take momentum-heavy monkeys out of a puzzle world and try to inject some of those basic concepts into a quasi-platformer. It's cute, sure, but that only last for the first 30 minutes or so before you realize how many times you've had to retry the same section because you either lack the skill to move past it or just keep dying because of the controls.
It's nice that they kept the original puzzles mode in the game (as Challenge Mode), but it's certainly nothing on the level of the older games. It's just going to disappoint SMB fans and leave a sour taste in the mouths of any newcomers to the series, and it's a shame. The concept itself was intriguing, but as Adventure proves, sometimes it's just best to stick to what works, for these little ball-clad simians, it's puzzles, plain and simple.
There's a line in the Jurassic Park movie (and, I'd imagine, the book, though it's been a while since I read that) where Jeff Goldblum's character, Ian Malcolm, chastises the scientists in the JP labs for charging ahead with cloning dinosaurs with a line like, "you were so busy worrying about whether or not you could that you didn't bother to ask yourselves if you should." That is, evidently, what went on with the development of Super Monkey Ball Adventure.
Can you make a game where the monkeys are ripped from their quaint little puzzle world and placed in a fairly-free roaming one with the same controls? Sure you can. Should TT Games (nee Traveller's Tales) have sought to remove the quirky little characters from their finish line dash for something far more expanded? Probably not.
But they did anyway, and the result is a game that is terribly frustrating to control, re-uses some of the more annoying aspects of the puzzle games (you can fall out of the world? Whaaa?), and ultimately just feels like a botched experiment that still somehow was green-lighted.
The puzzles are still here, tucked into the main adventure and used to open doors, but by nature of the fact that they weren't the focus, they feel sort of ham-fisted into the game. You'll notice plenty of inspiration from the original Super Monkey Ball games, but the imitation isn't always flattering, and rarely does it feel like the game really does the source material justice.
That I had more fun with the Party Games that are unlocked as you play though things than the actual main adventure says something about that main game, and some of them will be familiar to those that played the previous games. There are races, loaded with power-ups that slingshot you towards a winner, give you a little more oomph with your attack and so on; high-flying target practice/ski jump where momentum in landings plays a part (think the skydiving parts of Pilotwings... but with monkeys); a sort of monkey boxing game; a bouncing game where you attempt to hit all the jewels below to your color; a balloon collecting roll around a huge globe (sort of a take on Sonic 3's bonus rounds with better controls); and the fairly deep Monkey Cannon game where you fire monkey balls at an opponent's castle to try to get bricks which you use to power up your own castle.
It's not that the world that they created is terrible -- in point of fact, it's actually rather nice looking. The framerate is solid, the texture work certainly passable -- there's even a really cool effect where the screen tints black and white save for your character when you're near enemies called Naysayers. You've got plenty of characters to talk to, lots of variety in the five different worlds (islands) that you explore, and absolutely tons of bananas to collect should you be all obsessive-compulsive about stuff like that. The game is built like a platformer, slowly spoon feeding you powers and then introducing you to puzzles that utilize them so you get a nice sense of accomplishment.
[The Bad]
Unfortunately, you rarely do get a sense of accomplishment. Because of the open-ended nature of the worlds, things are meant to sort of ape (ho hoo!) the Metroidvania style of game where advancement past a certain point is blocked until you have the necessary upgrade to progress, but the clues as to what you'll need are often nowhere to be seen (or, more possibly, I was just too dense to see them). This can mean tons of lost time as you struggle to work through a world that feels like it was designed around a jump button but doesn't really have one. Loading times are kept to a minimum, but they're masked rather poorly by a handful of gates that you have to run around clumsily to load the next section.
That it was so hard for me to talk about the good parts of the game without throwing a "but this part..." section in there shows how hard the game is to love; for every thing that it does well, it does two other that just make it frustrating.
Nothing is more frustrating than just trying to get around, though. It's not just the controls, which feel overly touchy at times and horribly unresponsive when stuck in tight spaces, but the fact that the game relies so much on backtracking. Talking to other monkeys in the world gives you various missions, but if you do something as easy as falling out of the world, you have to run back and talk to them again to start the task all over. It leads to an overwhelming feeling of trial-and-error, and it sucks any remaining fun out of the game.
[The Verdict]
There's really not much to say here that hasn't already been said. It wasn't a wise move to take momentum-heavy monkeys out of a puzzle world and try to inject some of those basic concepts into a quasi-platformer. It's cute, sure, but that only last for the first 30 minutes or so before you realize how many times you've had to retry the same section because you either lack the skill to move past it or just keep dying because of the controls.
It's nice that they kept the original puzzles mode in the game (as Challenge Mode), but it's certainly nothing on the level of the older games. It's just going to disappoint SMB fans and leave a sour taste in the mouths of any newcomers to the series, and it's a shame. The concept itself was intriguing, but as Adventure proves, sometimes it's just best to stick to what works, for these little ball-clad simians, it's puzzles, plain and simple.
