Now that Super Monkey Ball is back in the spotlight, I thought I’d take a look at Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2 to see what it’s like to play them in (the current year). No more monkey business from me.
Transcript:
Anyone remember the game N?
It was first released as a flash game (rest in peace) all the way back in the olden days of 2005. Each level takes place on a single screen and your goal is to get this little ninja all the way over to this little door before the time runs out. The mechanics are dead-simple. All you can do is move and jump. But the fun is how far you can stretch those mechanics in the unique level designs. There’s no power-ups or stage mechanics that drastically change how you play the game, it’s all about how you move and jump to the goal.
N++, the most recent iteration of N, is fundamentally the same. Still no power-ups, still no crazy stage mechanics, no new abilities. Just moving and jumping. The thing that makes N++ special is the stage count. The first N had 100 levels on release. N+, it’s sequel, had more than 300 levels and received a couple DLC packs adding 150 singleplayer levels each.
N++ has 4,340 levels.
Yeah, you heard me right. 4,340 levels.
43 times the number of levels than the first game had. Just look at this episode selection screen. Each one of these squares is an episode that has 5 levels in it, it’s insane. And you know what? It gets even better.
It has a built-in level editor AND community level browser. You could play this game till the end of time.
I think it speaks to the quality of the N series and its fundamental gameplay that over 4,000 levels can be made and people can still have fun. N++ is more than a game. It’s a platform for people to enjoy playing N until they either get bored or die.
Super Monkey Ball needs it’s own N++.
The controls already peaked in 1 and 2. They don’t have to make any crazy changes to the Monkey Ball formula, they could just put out levels till the end of time and I’d be playing them. These games are just that fun to play.
A large part of that is because of the controls. Let’s talk about them for a bit.
I’m gonna start off with a criticism, but don’t get me wrong. I love these games. But… how do I put this?
I’m obviously in complete control when I’m playing, but sometimes, the monkey will inexplicably bounce or clip in a way I didn’t expect and ruin my run.
Hold on for a second, before you type your comment about how I should try “not falling off the stage”, let me explain. You can comment that after I try and justify why I’m bad at this game sometimes.
So many solutions in this game involve going really fast over narrow gaps or slamming into a tiny lip and bouncing in the air. These can be very enjoyable when everything goes the way you imagine, or you can, at the very least, improvise when things go slightly off. But look at this stage. Look at it’s fuckin name. They knew what they were doing. They knew there’s no consistent way to get to the goal quickly. Sure, you can hold up for a bit, but you have to slow down and improvise at some point.
I don’t have a problem dealing with randomness in stages. I only have a problem when it isn’t fun. Take Coasters. There’s consistent ways to do this stage, but the most fun way is to just speed down this tube as fast as you can and hope you don’t blast past the goal at the end. But this? This ain’t fun.
Sometimes, it feels like I’m playing Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy. You have precise control over your character, but little imperfections in your movement can cause drastic changes in outcome. But these games aren’t just asking you to be precise, they’re demanding endurance. Endurance to keep your hand steady as you line-up your thrust in Getting Over It or holding a very precise control stick angle as you go across a long slope in Monkey Ball.
It’s a skill that we often aren’t trained for as gamers. We’re accustomed to flick-shotting, not holding a precise position like this for a couple seconds while making micro-adjustments to make sure we don’t fall off. If I’m on a platform thinner than a strand of hair, and I start to wobble to one side, my instincts are to adjust HARD in the other direction. Which of course often leads to falling off that side. Just knowing that you shouldn’t over-correct isn’t enough, you have to train for dozens or even hundreds of hours to get over stuff like that. I have a lot of respect for people that are really good at this game, because they had to train themselves out of that instinct.
But even the best of the best have to deal with some bullshit from this game every now and then. I’ve watched speedrunners talk about some stages where you can prepare all you want, but in the end, it comes down to how well you can wing it.
That’s the nature of the beast. Playing Super Monkey Ball is like trying to throw a basketball into a hoop behind your back. You could theoretically do it every time if you had a bunch of data points like the weight of the ball, any surface imperfections on the ball, the wind speed, and were perfectly in control of your muscles to throw it with the exact amount of force needed. It could be done. Just as well, you could execute the steps to skip right to the goal on Guillotine. We know the exact speed the ball should be going at, the exact angle, the exact inputs to make to get smacked by the titular Guillotine and fly into the goal. Of course, a human can rarely execute such precise tricks unassisted, especially in a game that runs at 60 frames per second. Human error is inescapable.
Luckily for speedrunners, there is an assist. The humble pause screen. This unassuming brown box allows for some truly crazy maneuvers. It helps because it allows the player to find specific frames to execute their pre-practiced movements.
If we go back to Guillotine, we know what inputs to do at what time. It’s just a matter of executing them at the specific times. Complicated tricks like this are done by pausing and unpausing until you get the frame you’re attempting to get. A lot of the time there’s multiple frames you can try for if you miss the first one, but there’s always a fastest strat.
Let me first show you how this stage is played normally, then I’ll show you the skip. It’s not too slow of a stage, but you do go a long way around when the goal is pretty close to where you start out. Okay, I beat it. Not the fastest, but not the slowest either. I even skipped a cycle of the guillotine’s spin just to show off.
Now that you’ve seen how a God plays, I’ll show you how one of his subjects plays.
This is Glockinmytoyota, the world record holder for Super Monkey Ball 2 All Levels, and I’ll go over how he executes Guillotine in his current World Record.
These are the known frames you can pause on to execute the skip. I’ll explain this whole chart in a second.
After starting the stage, he waits for a bit. When going for this first pause, he could realistically hit any of these and be okay. He pauses once, and gets a 58:51, which isn’t one of the known pause frames, so he tries again and gets a 58:40. Since he got that time, he wants to be holding up and to the right by the time he unpauses. That’s the whole point of pause strats, you want to be holding exact inputs on exact frames to get consistent results. He does another pause, gets a 57:70, which isn’t on the list. He pauses and unpauses to get 57:68. The ones place in the timer’s milliseconds area will only show a 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, or 8. He unpaused and paused the game as fast as the game allows to go from 70 to 68. It literally doesn’t get faster than that. Once he gets 57:68, he holds up-left until it’s time to try for another pause frame in the midway through 56 seconds. He gets his first pause at 56:23, not a known pause frame, then secures the final frame of 56:18, at which point, he holds up-right to victory. I’ll play it one more time for you in real time.
Now, what would this strat look like if he was able to get all those inputs without pausing?
It’s impressive for sure, but nowhere near consistent enough to try in pauseless runs.
That example shows that you can definitely play Monkey Ball in a way to get consistent results every time. But the thing is… the average player isn’t gonna do that. They’re going to brute force it. They aren’t going to spend the time looking up and practicing the best tactics to throw a basketball into a hoop from half-court. They’re just gonna chuck it and pray.
Fortunately, Monkey Ball isn’t 100% randomness. As you play the game, you start to learn how the physics work. As you die dozens of times across a couple hundred levels, you learn how to work within and exploit the physics system.
Maybe you reach the stage Flat Maze and realize that these two paths are really close. So you go back a bit and run towards this gap at full speed. You hit the corner of the path across the gap and jump into the air. This is a strategy that gets lodged in your mind once you learn it. You’re constantly thinking of what skips you can do on future or past stages with this knowledge. You also could use this knowledge to experiment and learn some even more complicated strats. What if, instead of jumping by using a path across a small gap, you jumped by using the corner of the path you’re already on? That allows you to do even more skips, because you don’t need the specific circumstances of a small gap between two paths. This is knowledge you learn yourself, that you can use across any stage in the game. It’s not like you got enough XP and learned the “Jump” skill. You learned how to exploit the systems in the game to your advantage. That’s more meaningful than any skill tree.
And the best part, is that the stages encourage trying out these weird tactics. Not just through extrinsic rewards like getting a more difficult-to-reach goal and skipping stages, but it’s intrinsically satisfying to obtain, then pull off a difficult strategy. Stages often have multiple solutions to encourage experimentation.
Let’s take a break from all this monkey business and get back to some ninja business.
I came across a GDC talk the other day by Mare Sheppard, one of the two developers of N++, and I was fascinated with her insights on creating thousands of levels for the game. She revealed that they had an internal rating system for levels. Once a stage was created, it was given a rating of 0, 1, or 2.
Stages that have no interesting design decisions or are deemed too boring are given a rating of 0. Stages at this point are marked for redesign or cut altogether.
Stages with a 2 are stages with a strong mechanical hook or twist. These are often longer stages that might stick in the player’s mind for a bit, whether that’s because of difficulty or just the sheer spectacle of it.
Stages rated as a 1 are, as you might expect, middle of the road. They aren’t as boring as a stage rated 0 but they aren’t quite as interesting as a stage rated 2. Levels with this rating won’t blow the player’s mind, but they’re still important.
You need the slightly less interesting stages to properly pace the player. A game full of huge stages with a ton of different challenging mechanics would get tiring. I can speak from experience, that I hate spending a minute or two beating a level that has me going across the whole screen, dodging enemies, and collecting gold all over the place, only to beat it and play another stage just like it right after. It’s fun to have a chill stage after that that isn’t as challenging every now and then, just take a mental break for a bit. It keeps stress levels in check.
Another thing she talked about, is their love for making multiple paths through levels. Multiple ways to complete a goal or challenge is my preferred way of difficulty selection in a platformer. If you’re up for it, you can take optional paths to get to the goal quicker or just gather some gold. But if you’re not, you can just stick to the simpler path and finish the stage. You aren’t penalized or anything. Just getting to the goal before the time runs out is the baseline. Whatever little tricks you pull off or collectables you go for in addition to that is solely for your own pleasure.
Multiple paths aren’t just for difficulty selection though, they’re for player expression. Given two equally difficult paths, different players will choose different approaches. I like doing quick wall jumps, so if I’m presented with the option to do some quick wall jumps or walk onto a jump-pad, I’m gonna go for the former. But I can very easily see someone going for the latter. It’s just a matter of preference.
Player expression is extremely important in games like this. It’s what keeps people coming back. Hell, it’s what’s kept people playing Super Mario 64 all these years. There are so many different approaches that can be done for each Star in that game, no one player is gonna experience all of them. All these differing playstyles congeal into the modern idea of Super Mario 64.
It’s a game defined by the unique way that everyone plays it. People aren’t talking about design of the intended paths to stars nowadays. They talk about how to beat the game without pressing the A button or collect every star as fast as possible. But even at it’s highest level, where the movement is optimized to it’s absolute limit, there’s still room for player expression.
It might not look like it, but speedrunners competing for world records have little flourishes and tricks that only they do. I bet if you showed a top speedrunner of SM64 the run of another top runner, they could tell you exactly who was playing.
Simply put, people love having fun. And if you make a game that has multiple ways for different types of people to have fun in a single level, then it’s gonna resonate with a lot more people than if you only appealed to one type of player.
I’ll close this section with a sentiment shared by Mare Sheppard in her GDC talk.
She stressed that N++ isn’t about finding THE way to the goal, it’s about finding A way to the goal.
Super Monkey Ball is at it’s best when you’re finding A way to the goal, not just going THE way to the goal. They incentivize trying multiple paths by implementing green and red goals to aim for some stages. In challenge mode, if you get one of these goals, then you skip a stage or two with the green goal and you skip a handful of you skip a handful with the red one. Considering that these goals skip stages, they’re naturally harder to get to. Better players are tempted to go for harder goals and finish the collection of stages with a faster time. And newer players will be content just going for the easier goal. This way, everyone can have fun.
Unfortunately, some stages aren’t fun for anyone.
With as many stages as there are in Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2, there are bound to be some misses. But how do the stages from both games compare? I, but a humble monkey baller, will give my own perspective.
Monkey Ball, and it’s more well-known port Super Monkey Ball, features levels that are easy to parse at a glance. They generally don’t have a lot of gimmicks to surprise you with and you’ll mostly stick to rolling around through levels at your own pace. Difficulty in this game comes from how well you can handle narrow pathways or awkward slopes. It’s all about you mastering the controls.
Stages like Exam A, B, and C perfectly embody the spirit of Monkey Ball. You first come across Exam A during the Beginner set of stages. You might be thinking that this looks a little difficult to be in the Beginner set, but I think that’s a good thing. It serves as a benchmark to make sure you can handle somewhat narrow paths. An… exam. If you will.
Exam B, located in the Advanced set of stages. takes the challenges you encountered in Exam A and makes them a little more difficult. Paths are more narrow, gaps are widened, and the individual challenges are longer. It’s a satisfying stage to beat, because you realize how far you’ve come since Exam A.
Exam C is where it all comes together. This stage is in the Expert category and the challenges featured all the way back in Exam A are pushed to their logical conclusion. A steep slope to start you off, a very awkward floor pattern, and closes off with an even longer and narrower path. Learning how to work around these tropes in stage design are necessary for beating the remaining stages in Expert mode. Because you aren’t anywhere close to beating Expert yet. You have 43 stages left in Expert, and 53 if you play your cards right.
These three stages show how the developers really cared about easing you into the more difficult stages. Having a challenge that appears similar to an earlier one, only harder, ties a neat bow on your progression as a player. You get to reflect on how far you’ve come. This game has a handful of stage concepts that follow the philosophy of “take an earlier stage, but make it harder”, and I love it.
Super Monkey Ball could be described in a lot of words, but I’ll just stick with one. Concise. It knows it’s strengths and doesn’t venture far outside of that.
Super Monkey Ball 2, on the other hand… has a lot going on.
It has more gimmicks, more obstacles, more moving parts, more… everything. Stages become way more dynamic in Super Monkey Ball 2. As a result of this, the biggest thing you’ll notice when going from the first game to this, is that you do a lot more waiting around. Waiting for an obstacle to stop moving, waiting for the goal to appear, waiting for a path to line up, you get the idea. Waiting is the name of the game. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Say what you will about Arthropod, but you can’t deny that it’s striking. This stage has stuck with me since I first played this game as a kid because of how strange it is. There’s no other creature like this in the entire game. This stage very easily could have been made without the big bug, but because of its addition, it forces itself into your mind, never to leave.
Another memorable stage, Switch Inferno. Super Monkey Ball 2 introduced buttons to stages. These buttons can speed-up the stage’s cycles, slow it down, pause it, or trigger some event. In most stages with buttons, you start by landing on the fast-forward button, but if you turn around and go to the back of the starting platform, you can set it to normal speed if you’re having a hard time. Buttons are a great mechanics for players to select their own difficulties.
Anyway, Switch Inferno. The most buttons you’ve seen in a stage up to this point is likely 5. This stage has 64 goddamn buttons. 60 of those trigger movable walls that send you flying and only 4 reveal the goal.
I wouldn’t even rate this stage as a 0, it’s more like a -10. The N++ developers have some sense to not even start work on a stage like this, I don’t know what Amusement Vision was thinking.
You’d have to have actual brain rot to like this stage, but it’s definitely memorable, I’ll give them that. Super Monkey Ball 2 was a period of exploration. Exploration of what monkey ball could be. Could it be about solving puzzles? Controlling a monkey at high speeds? Should stages have more physics-based obstacles or should stage elements be more static? There’s more types of stages than you can shake a banana at.
Experimentation like this is necessary early on in a platforming series like this. The developers need to find out what works and what doesn’t in-engine.
Let’s take a look at two different stages.
First up is Dynamic Maze. The goal is at the end of this maze, and you have to wait for sections to lift into the air so you can go under them. It’s a stage defined by waiting. You roll into the maze and slam against a wall. You wait for that wall to lift up, then you slam into another one. Repeat until you get into the goal. Where’s the fun? Did I forget to pick up the fun along the way? I could get all flowery with my language and rant about why this sucks for minutes on end, but I don’t need to! It’s as simple as “waiting for simple cycles isn’t fun.” This stage is an easy 0.
Compare that 8 Bracelets. If you haven’t played Monkey Ball before, this stage might actually look impossible. But I assure you, as a Monkey Ball veteran, it IS possible. And it’s fun too! It’s fun to gain speed as you ride up and down the bracelets and transfer to the next one at the apex of your airtime so you gain even more speed. Grinding the edge of the bracelets so you can stay in the air as little as possible is a fun challenge. And it’s a challenge wholly determined by the skill of the player. I can safely rate this stage at a 2.
I don’t want you to think the takeaway is that “stages with cycles bad” and “static stages good” though. There’s plenty examples of good and bad stages in both categories. Post Modern is a boring-ass static stage where you just slowly bump up a buncha steps, and Mad Shuffle is a stage on a cycle that’s very satisfying to beat quickly.
While there are both static and cycle-based stages, there’s a lot more cycle-based stages compared to the first game, so it’s hard not to see Monkey Ball 2 as this gimmick filled mess. It’s important to remember that gimmicks aren’t inherently bad, though. That word has assumed some negative baggage over the years, especially in the gaming space, but gimmicks are a valuable tool. They can surprise the player and leave them with a lasting impression. Just hope that developers don’t want to leave impressions like Switch Inferno on you…
Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2 are games that stuck with people for a long time, despite all the middling sequels and spin-offs since 2 released all the way back in 2002. Those two games stand the test of time and are just as fun as they were back then. I think that’s because they’re so unique. There’s been no games since then to iterate on what they did and make them seem outdated in comparison. Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2 were the kings of the ball-rolling genre and nobody dared to overthrow them.
But what about in 2021? How is the Monkey Ball franchise after all this time? What’s the best way to play one of these “monkey balls”?
If you’ve made it this far into the video, you know about Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania. It’s a remake of 1 and 2, and can I just say, that I’m really glad these games get another chance in the spotlight. Gamers “in the know” have been raving about them as hidden gems for over a decade, and now, I can just point newer gamers to digital storefronts to play them on current gen consoles.
There’s so much to love about Banana Mania.
I can talk all about the additions and extras to this game (and I will), but those are all secondary to one simple fact. They nailed the physics. Asterisk.
So many remakes have come out in the past decade or so that have completely bungled the physics of the original games. And it sucks, because sometimes, you might love everything that surrounds the physics in one of those remakes, like what they did with the graphics or any quality of life changes, but if it doesn’t play like the original, then it’s going against what made people like it in the first place.
Banana Mania does a pretty good job at capturing what it was like playing Super Monkey Ball back in the early 2000s. And this is in an entirely new engine, so it’s pretty impressive they got this far. As someone who was a casual player back in the day, it plays exactly like I remember.
Unfortunately… memory can be deceiving. Remember how I said “They nailed the physics.” earlier? It turns out, they didn’t quite nail the physics.
For my first couple hours of the game, I didn’t have much criticisms to levy against the game. Then, I go watch some Streamers play the game to see some crazy speedrunning strats. And it seems like the overall consensus is that Banana Mania isn’t as enjoyable to play as the originals.
If I’m being honest, I don’t know what the exact differences are. I’ve seen people suggesting that if you change the analog stick gate to “Square” in Steam’s input settings, it feels better to play, but I didn’t feel any changes from this. The only aspect that I’ve noticed personally, is that it’s harder to roll up some slopes. I’ve seen other people mention this, so I know it’s not just me.
However, just because I don’t notice the other problems doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Even though I know something is up, I’m still kinda ignorant to what physics/control problems are actually under the hood. I don’t wanna spend too much more time talking about this, because it’s not something that’ll annoy newer players.
Hell, I didn’t even notice it in the first place. It’s been like 15 years since I played Super Monkey Ball 2 for any period of time longer than half an hour, so I forgot the intricacies of what it was like to roll up steep slopes. I remember getting frustrated at slopes in some stages, but I didn’t think my frustration might not have surfaced in the original game.
One thing I knew for sure wouldn’t frustrate me in the original game, is going in a straight line. That shit sucks in this game.
This is something I realized as soon as I played the first stage. Right when I went to hold up to roll straight into the goal.
Yeah. You can’t roll straight.
(Sigh.) Look… I can’t blame this on the developers. This is purely a problem of controllers nowadays. If this were a perfect world, all modern consoles would be using Gamecube controllers, but alas, this is not a perfect world. We are stuck with imprecise and slippery joysticks. Notches are a thing of the past and we’ve “evolved” into perfectly round joystick slots.
Being able to hold one very precise direction consistently is crucial in a lot of stages. Think back to the speedrun of Guillotine I showed earlier, and how players are able to each strats like that consistently. You try and pause on a certain frame, then you hold a certain direction. If I’m supposed to hold up for a specific trick, I can do it sometimes, but most of the time, my joystick will be very slightly off from straight up. And “slightly off” isn’t good enough for extremely precise tricks like in Guillotine.
I spent a bunch of time earlier talking about how little variations in your movement can cause drastic changes in an otherwise consistent trick, now think about how annoying that is when you can’t even get a precise joystick input.
Holding a diagonal is even worse. When trying to move in any of the cardinal directions, it’s not the worst thing in the world, because you only have to move your thumb in one direction. You move your thumb forward for North, you pull it back for South, and you go left and right for West and East. But for the ordinal directions, you have to combine these two movements. If you wanted to hit the exact input for up and to the right, you have to move your thumb forward AND move it rightward at the same time. By being forced to do these two movements at the same time, you’re a lot less likely to hit the goal of up-right on your first input. You might realize you’re a little too high or a little too low, and while you can course correct and adjust, you’ve already made too big of a mistake on the more difficult levels. If you’re on a razor thin platform and make too heavy of an over-correction, you’re falling off.
Notches simplify that process immensely. You just slam your joystick to what you think is up and right, and the diagonal lines between each cardinal and ordinal direction naturally guide you into place. There’s no need to course correct, or question if you’re actually holding up-right and aren’t ever so slightly off. You can trust in the construction of the controller to guide you to the right place.
It would be remiss of me to not mention that you can technically play Banana Mania with a Gamecube controller. If you have a gamecube-to-usb adapter for your switch or PC, you can make use of the glorious notches like god intended. And you could use a keyboard to get exact digital inputs for the 8 main directions, but I think it’s safe to say a majority of people who play this game are using a controller that doesn’t have notches.
So I’m not sure what the takeaway is here. It’s not like I can try and raise awareness about this to get it patched. This isn’t a problem that can be patched out. I’m not gonna tell everyone who wants to play this game to go out and buy a Gamecube controller. That’d be crazy. Only crazy people buy Gamecube controllers in the current year. I guess this “criticism”, if you can even call it that, is mostly just a statement of fact. Yeah it sucks, it’s just something you have to deal with. It’s not a fault of the developers or anything, just shitty circumstances.
If you’re not someone with knowledge of what it’s like to play Super Monkey Ball on the Gamecube, then I don’t think you’re gonna have a problem with controls at all. Ignorance is bliss, in a way. If you don’t know what you’re missing, then it can’t bother you.
Everything surrounding the gameplay in Banana Mania is top notch though. There’s so many little quality of life additions and extras that make it fun to play a stage once you’ve beaten it.
There are missions that you can complete. These range from get the red goal in this stage, to beating Beginner without dying 10 times, to getting every powerup in a single match in Monkey Fight. Missions cover almost all aspects of the game, so you’ll be working towards completing a mission no matter what you’re doing.
Completing missions gives you points that you can use to buy a bunch of cosmetics and new gamemodes. It’s great to see stuff like this in a world of DLC characters. Though this game does technically have DLC characters, but that’s besides the point. There’s a ton of stuff to unlock. If you’re driven by extrinsic rewards, then you’ll find a lot of reasons to keep playing this game.
But what if you aren’t tempted by a bunch of tiny little goals to keep the Zoomers playing? What if those changes to controls really are a deal breaker? You always could go back and play the originals.
And thankfully, these games have aged gracefully. The controls aren’t too awkward, the camera is great, the art style is nice, what isn’t there to love? All of my criticisms levied towards Banana Mania are predicated on the fact that it isn’t like the originals in some way or another. So if you just play those games, you’re getting the raw Monkey experience that everyone fell in love with back in the day.
The only thing that’ll suck is playing with a notchless controller. Like I said, you can technically use a Gamecube-to-USB adapter if you don’t want to play on a console, but I don’t think people are gonna buy a controller for just one game. But if you do happen to have a gamecube laying around, and you don’t have either Super Monkey Ball for some reason, definitely give it a go.
But what if… you aren’t tempted by monkeys at all? What if rats are more your speed? All great games have indie developers trying to recapture it’s magic. And Super Monkey Ball is no different.
Rolled Out was announced with an Indiegogo campaign towards the beginning of 2019. The lead developer, Brandon Johnson, hoped to include some firsts for the “rolling ball genre” or whatever you wanna call it. Most notably, custom level support. Fast forward two and a half years later, and the game is in Early Access. Custom levels can be made, but it’s definitely not accessible to your average player. Levels are made through a custom Blender plugin and level files are shared through discord. Not the most streamlined process, if you ask me.
As for the gameplay, it plays perfectly. Just as I’m worried about developers messing up remakes of their own games, I’m often worried about indie developers recreating a game that they love, but not quite hitting the mark. Fortunately, that’s not the case here. The controls are just as good as any Monkey Ball.
This game has potential. Serious potential. Potential to be Super Monkey Ball’s N++. The game that Monkey Ball fans can use to play user created levels till the heat death of the universe. But something N++ has over Rolled out, is how easy it is to make and share a level. I’m not really a person to spam upload a bunch of levels in games that have level creators, but I think it’s fun to just mess around in them sometimes.
Luckily, the developers are planning on working on an in-game editor at a later date. So thumbs up for that.
Rolled Out was announced at the best possible time. It’s crowdfunding campaign started before Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD was announced in the latter half of 2019. It was the dark ages back then. We didn’t know when, if at all, the next Monkey Ball game was coming. The last true Monkey Ball came out in 2012 on the Vita. The Vita! And people weren’t playing that game, they were playing 1 and 2 still.
Little did us ball enthusiasts know at the time, Sega was planning a big comeback for Monkey Ball. Banana Blitz HD being announced felt kinda weird, because not a lot of people seemed to really care about that game, at least compared to the first 2. I didn’t even mention it until now, because it doesn’t feel that important in the Monkey Ball lineage. It was released after the poorly received Super Monkey Ball Adventure, and while it did go back to its roots in some ways, it deviated in one major way.
Motion controls.
I think the stage design was lacking in comparison to 1 and 2, but the sheer fact that the stage is tilted using the wii remote really left a mark on the game. A lot of people, myself included, thought, “Why did they choose this over Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2? Nobody actually likes Banana Blitz.”
Then Banana Mania was announced and everyone went apeshit. I still don’t know why they released the Banana Blitz remaster before the 1 and 2 remake. But I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. If they wanted to use it to test the waters for a full on remake, then fine by me.
I can’t help but be excited for the future of Monkey Ball. A pretty good remake of the best games in the series just came out and is selling pretty well. That must bode well for a potential new game, right? There’s a lot of directions that the series can be taken in now. I think with all the middling spin-offs over the past decade, Sega has enough information to realize what works and what doesn’t design-wise.
A new Monkey Ball will come out sometime in the future. It could be in two years or two decades. Let’s just hope and pray that we have notches on controllers again.
Phew. Thanks for sticking around. Putting together this video has been a doozy. This is the most effort I’ve put into a video, by far, and I hope it shows. I’ve always wanted to do a deep dive into a game or series, but I never had the confidence that I could pull it off. As I’m finishing this script, I hope I see it through to release. Though if you’re hearing this, I guess I pushed through it.
I don’t know if my next video will be this long, I’ll have to see what the reception is to this one before I make a decision either way. I hope you stick with me for that video, whatever it may be.
Again, thanks for watching. I’ll see ya around.