Super Monkey Ball Adventure

Ifs al here: the puzzle stages that haw you rolling precariously inside your ball from point A to point B, as well as the always entertaining party games such as monkey boxing and hang gliding. So if all the pieces that make the Monkey Ball games great are here, why the lame score? Because you can get a bigger, better version of this game already via Super Monkey Ball Deluxe (on the XB and PS2) which nets you more content for half the price. Adventure (or Diet Monkey Ball, as I like to call ) gives you a measly 50 puzzle stages (Deluxe has 300) and fewer than half the party games of its predecessor (five versus Deluxe's 12). The newest addition, the story mode, sucks hard. You roll around in your ball, talking to amazingly annoying monkeys (their voices are so bad that I scrambled for the mute button), who give you mundane tasks that'll have you heading back to the puzzle stages in no time. Also, the long load times and confused camera system feel awfully sloppy. Monkey Ball has been a good series these past few years, so let's pretend this game never happened.

Sometimes when you hand a little kid a gift, he ends up beguiling himself with the box instead of the toy inside. That's pretty much what Adventure was to me. The whole time I was playing the game's supposedly appealing adventure (which is essentially a collection of tedious errands), just craved the series' traditional wrappings of ball-rolling puzzles and minigames. Thankfully, you can find them in a separate mode and lightly sprinkled throughout story mode. Adventure is also home to fperhaps 2006's most annoying videogame voice acting. The characters' vocabulary consists solely of the word monkey...which is as excruciating as it sounds. Play Adventure for the solid traditional modes and adequate multiplayer, but idon't expect to get much enjoyment out of the dull platforming.

Don't spend 40 bucks here. Go on, friend; keep walking. Move over to Sly Cooper, pick it up, and go ahead and grab a copy of Super Monkey Ball Deluxe or one of the GameCube Monkey Balls that's spending your money much more wisely. Adventure's new minigames and puzzle stages don't offer any real improvement over previous Balls' and you can expect the same horrific camera. Meanwhile, the new platforming portions will give you nightmares. To make this idea work, the developers either need to design stages around the idea of a rolling character or just let you be a monkey, sans ball. Instead, you're a monkey in a ball in a world full of monkeys who aren't trapped in balls and it's a crummy, barely navigable world indeed.