Review: Super Monkey Ball

Update 9/02/08 - Super Monkey Ball v1.01 released.

Overview

From the iTune's page: "Let's roll! Guide a cute little monkey encased in a transparent ball to victory by tilting and rolling him through a variety of slopes and turns. You must navigate a large variety of obstacle courses to reach goal lines within set time limits."

Gameplay

Super Monkey Ball begins with a prompt to select from 5 different modes: Main Game, Instant Play, Practice, Ranking, and Options.

Options allows you to set volumes for music & sound effects, reset the rankings, and display staff credits. Rankings will show you the high scores for each stage (maps) of which there are 110, divided amongst 5 different worlds (settings). The other 3 modes (Main Game, Instant Play, & Practice) all take you to actual gameplay and are self-explanatory. I recommend starting off with some Practice and Instant Play, as the game uses fickle manipulations of the accelerometer to steer your Monkey Ball towards the goal. Practice Mode actually allows you to select a character, a world, and a specific stage to try out with unlimited lives, while Instant Play just throws you into pre-set stages.

The default positioning to make your Super Monkey Ball stand still appears to be completely balanced (right corner of phone parallel with left) with the entire unit tilted forward at a 45 degree angle. Steer your monkey to collect bananas for points and extra lives. Your banana counter in the bottom-right lets you know how many bananas you've collected out of how many total in your current stage, while your banana counter in the upper-right clicks up to 10 (which gives you an extra life) before resetting. You can tap the clock at the top of the screen (yes, each stage is timed and you'll concede a life if you let it hit 0) to pause the game. How many lives you have left is also displayed in the upper-right (you start with 5). Your mph is also displayed in the bottom left, though I couldn't find an odometer to see how far we'd traveled or if my particular Super Monkey Ball was fuel-efficient.

Review

It's received overwhelmingly positive reviews in the App Store (4 stars). It holds the coveted spot as 'Top Paid App'. And well, damnit, it's Super Monkey Ball! I was really excited to test out Sega's incarnation of the old arcade classic on the iPhone. So guess what happened?

Well it bonked out on me the first 6 times I tried to run the program. Now, I won't hold it against Sega because my battery was a smidge low and after a quick charge the problems stopped. Gameplay itself is initially pretty fun despite the tedious process of adjusting to the accelerometer controls. Adopting a proper hold-technique is crucial, and I recommend adding a stretching regimen and carb-loading program into your pre-play routine as well. Grabbing the phone horizontally between my index fingers (on the top) and thumbs (on the bottom) improved my control after varying attempts of idiocy and clumsiness. But even after mastering the 'hold' technique and donning a sweet-super-monkey-ball-official sweatband, my desire to compete faded quickly. Because after stripping back the glitz & glamor of the charismatic graphics and upbeat music, the realization that I was left with a pretty modest experience on the 'fun-o-meter' scale fell upon me. I got bored pretty quickly... Maybe 45 minutes of play wasn't enough of a run for Super Monkey Ball to show me the rich and diversified gameplay I was looking for... but I think it's Segas job to make it fun & interesting enough along the way for me to give them the benefit of the doubt and want to continue monkeying around. Notable missing features include the lack of 'Save' option and the ability to adjust the accelerometer sensitivity.

Summary

Slick little game. I'll treasure the time we shared together, but don't call me, I'll call you. xoxo (monkey love), Andrew

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