Top Five Super Monkey Ball Games

With the recent official announcement of Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD coming to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC later this year, SuperPhillip Central is in the mood for some monkey business. Make that some Super Monkey Ball business with the best entries in the long-running arcade-style series. It's time to go bananas.

5) Super Monkey Ball 3D (3DS)

Imagine, if you will, a Super Monkey Ball game that launched with the Nintendo 3DS that eased you into the game and let you essentially play with training wheels on. Sounds typical of a Super Monkey Ball game, yes? I mean, the first world or so usually always has few ways to truly fail them in an overly simple fashion. However, what if there was a Super Monkey Ball game that pretty much left those training wheels on for the duration of its adventure? Enter Super Monkey Ball 3D. While the game has some fun features to it, plays well enough (save for the dreadful collection of mini-games), and has an okay amount of content, Super Monkey Ball 3D is hardly a standout game in the series, but at least it's better than the entries that didn't make this list, right?

4) Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz (Wii)

Super Monkey Ball is a series that was synonymous with releasing as a launch game for a Nintendo system. It worked out that way with the Nintendo Wii with Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz. This entry introduced motion controls and a jump mechanic to the series. Seeing how this wasn't implemented in pretty much any other Super Monkey Ball game, it's pretty clear to see that this wasn't too well received. That said, Banana Blitz offered a creative concoction of crafty levels to play through, sported some enjoyable boss battles (for the most part), and has without a doubt my favorite soundtrack in the franchise. With the recent remaster announced (and again, one of the main reasons why this list is even on SuperPhillip Central to begin with), it'll be interesting to see if the issues players had with the original Banana Blitz will be remedied.

3) Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz (PSV)

The only Super Monkey Ball game that was exclusive to a PlayStation platform, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz returned to the familiar formula of the Super Monkey Ball series. It was as simple as rolling your chosen monkey in a ball through increasingly more difficult courses without worries of using motion sensing technology or a jump mechanic. However, like every Super Monkey Ball game after Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2, Banana Splitz had its fair share of problems, too. For one, the game was insanely difficult--and the fact that lives and continues were hard or near impossible to obtain meant that it was a breeze to get a game over once you reached the ridiculously challenging and close to unfair later levels. Add that to mini-games that shoehorned in the PlayStation Vita's various functionality to poor effect, and you have a Super Monkey Ball game that had potential but failed to truly delight.

2) Super Monkey Ball Jr. (GBA)

Super Monkey Ball Jr. is special for being one of the sole entries in the franchise made by a Western studio--of course, with the original development team supervising. It's also one of the only Game Boy Advance games that used the system's 3D graphic capabilities, and doing so in a dazzling display--for the time and for the hardware power of the system in general. While many of the stages in Super Monkey Ball Jr. were lifted directly from the original Super Monkey Ball, having the ability to play a miniature version of the game on a system that could fit in your pocket was extraordinary back in the day. Not only this, but the actual game played well and showed that the series had great potential in portable form. ...Unrealized potential--but potential in portable form nonetheless!

1) Super Monkey Ball Deluxe (PS2, XBX)

Rather than select the original Super Monkey Ball that released with the Nintendo GameCube or its sequel, I'm opting to cheese things a bit and include Super Monkey Ball Deluxe on this list--and making it number one here as well. It contains all of the best parts of Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2, with all of its glorious, delectable content and stages, but it also features dozens upon dozens of wholly original and exclusive stages to the Deluxe version. Super Monkey Ball Deluxe brought the series to the greatest heights it has ever been at, and combining two of the best Super Monkey Ball games as the number one pick on this list of best SMB games might be a bit cheap--just like some of those Master level stages in the game--but I did it anyway!

SuperPhillip Central's Favorite VGMs - "How Can I Handle All of This Cute" Edition

SuperPhillip Central is kicking off your work week with cuteness, adorableness, and stuff that you just want to hug. Now, if you haven't been revolted by the sweetness of the introduction to this edition of SuperPhillip Central's Favorite VGMs, then sit tight and get ready for some great music from some excellent games.

Yoshi and Poochy (no, don't worry-- not The Simpsons' Poochy) lead things off with Yoshi's Woolly World. Then, we go deep-sea divin' with Kirby and the Rainbow Curse. Following that is a peppy tune from LocoRoco. Rounding things up are themes from Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz. Between cute dinosaurs, adorable monkeys, and everything else in between, this is not just cuteness overload but awesome music overload too!

As always, click on the VGM volume to hear the song mentioned. Finally, check out the VGM Database for all past VGM volumes featured on SuperPhillip Central's Favorite VGMs over the years. Now, let's get on to the music!

v1306. Yoshi's Woolly World (Wii U) - Welcome to Yoshi's Woolly World!

We start off this edition of SuperPhillip Central's Favorite VGMs with a game that is seeing a Nintendo 3DS port next month. Yoshi's Woolly World released on the Wii U, and I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a worthy successor to Yoshi's Island (finally, right?). Its soundtrack is amazing, offering pleasant and cheery tunes fitting for the adorable aesthetic of the game. I'm looking forward to having an excuse to replay this game when Poochy and Yoshi's Woolly World releases on the Nintendo 3DS early next month.

v1307. Kirby and the Rainbow Curse (Wii U) - Deep-Divin' Kirby Submarine

Kirby's sole Wii U entry saw HAL Laboratory create a successor to Kirby Canvas Curse, the classic Nintendo DS game that released early in the system's life, the very game that for me proved the Nintendo DS's touch screen's worth. While Canvas Curse had a nice soundtrack, Kirby and the Rainbow Curse has one of the best soundtracks period in any Kirby game-- heck, in any Wii U game!

v1308. LocoRoco (PSP) - Yellow's Theme

Each color of LocoRoco has their own theme song attached to them. For what is essentially the leading color of the series, Yellow LocoRoco's theme is called Bu bu poruche, sung in the fictional LocoRoco language. Regardless of the language of the song that no one could possibly understand, the common language we all share is that of music. Here, we have an upbeat tune that you'd have to have feet of stone to not have your toes tap to.

v1309. Pokemon Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald (GBA) - Route 110

Pokemon's third generation saw the series jump into a wider array of colors than what the series was originally limited to on the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color. With Pokemon Ruby, Sapphire, and later Emerald, the Game Boy Advance showed its power with improved visuals and a better sound. Route 110 is a triumphant tune that uses synth brass to great effect.

v1310. Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz (Vita) - Advanced World 4: Cardboard West

Sega really exhausted gamers with sequel after sequel of Super Monkey Ball. It seemed like for the longest time that every platform under the sun would get a Super Monkey Ball game of some type. The latest in the series arrived on the PlayStation Vita, and it was darn hard, and not in a fair way. Many times you could perform the same moves in one try at a level and whether you'd complete it or not was seemingly random. Regardless, the quality of the music, as heard with this lovely tune, continues the Super Monkey Ball tradition of being fantastic.

Toughest Tasks in Gaming History - Volume Two

Do you consider yourself to be a hardcore gamer? Just how hard of a hardcore gamer do you think you are? Do you think you could perform some of the most difficult feats in gaming? Even if you don't think you could, Toughest Tasks in Gaming History is here to show you some of the most challenging feats in gaming. No, we don't mean things like becoming a credible gaming journalist. No, no! We're talking feats that will amaze friends within your gaming circle. This second volume contains tasks from games like Gears of War 3, Dead Rising, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl!

If you missed the inaugural edition of Toughest Tasks in Gaming History, have no fear! We have the first volume's link right here!

Seriously 3.0 - Gears of War 3 (360)

Some tasks in gaming are tough because of the challenge involved, while others are tough due to the time investment required. Gears of War 3's Seriously 3.0 achievement focuses on the latter. In the original Gears of War, there was the original Seriously achievement, earned through obtaining 10,000 kills. The sequel required the player to up their killcount exponentially with 100,000 enemies killed. This time one could earn these kills in and out of multiplayer (through grinding the last level over and over again in a sensationally stupid, tedious, and so-not-worth-it way).

Seriously 3.0 requires you to reach level 100 as well as acquire all 65 Onyx medals. What does that actually mean for the player? Well, one has you being forced to play over 15,000 multiplayer matches at the very minimum and score over 70,000 kills. Unless you absolutely can't live without Gears of War 3, this tough task is only reserved for the biggest fans of the game.

7 Day Survivor - Dead Rising (360)

Through completing the main campaign of Capcom's Dead Rising for the Xbox 360, Infinite mode unlocks. This mode requires Frank "covered wars, y'know" West to survive for seven in-game days. Each day in Dead Rising lasts two hours, so simple math has a 7 Day Survivor achievement-acquirer spending 14 hours total on this task.

You must constantly babysit Frank, as his health bar is always declining. He must eat over 40 meals at the very least to stay alive (a full health bar will empty in 20 minutes), he must survive against a zombie horde that wants him as a nighttime snack, and there are no checkpoints or save points to help the player with. That means you must have your Xbox 360 on for at least 14 hours. Huh. No wonder our damn Xbox 360 overheated on us when we got this achievement!

Collecting all of the trophies - Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii)

With the Super Smash Bros. series' fourth and fifth installments releasing later this year, it seems like as good a time as any to look back at the latest game in the franchise, Super Smash Bros. Brawl. One cool feature of Brawl, which was also in Melee, is that of trophies. These trophies are modeled after various characters, objects, items, and more from numerous Nintendo properties. It's a veritable virtual museum for Nintendo fans.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl introduced a challenge wall, much like what was seen in Kirby Air Ride, another Masahiro Sakurai directed title. As in-game tasks are completed, individual panes on the challenge wall shatter, revealing a prize.

In order to get every trophy in the game, a player needs to not only acquire all the trophies found in the challenge wall (this means beating the game's modes on the hardest difficulty), but he or she must turn every enemy and boss in the Subspace Emissary mode into a trophy with a trophy stand item, and beat the Classic and All-Star modes as every character. Not just immensely challenging as a task, but time-consuming, those who have collected every trophy Super Smash Bros. Brawl has to offer are without a doubt the best and brightest the franchise has to offer.

Super Monkey Master - Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz (Vita)

The PlayStation Vita's edition of the Super Monkey Ball series is a title that will grab you by the monkey balls and not let go. It's a very difficult game, featuring a steep leap in difficulty going from the intermediate to the advanced stages of the game. It's a feat all on its own to simply beat the fifty stages of the advanced mode, and that's because you don't have the luxury of unlimited continues until after you beat the mode.

What does Super Monkey Master entail, then? Well, it's the simple task of beating every stage in the game without ever using a continue. Be sure to grab as many bananas as you can to rack up those lives, master those challenging stages as many times as you can in Practice mode, and keep those palms steady! If you can somehow obtain this incredibly rare trophy, then pat yourself on the back, as you are indeed a Super Monkey Master!

Beating the game - Contra (NES)

...How about without the famous Konami code? Heck, even with the code activated, the original Contra on the Nintendo Entertainment System was no walk in the park... Well, maybe a walk in the park if your park has a hail of gunfire, explosions, and one-hit kills every step of the way.

Without the Konami code activated, which would give players thirty lives to work with, Contra only gave players three lives to work with. Yes. Three. Lives. Throw in the little caveat that every hit you took was a one-hit kill, and those lives just fly away like scraps of paper in the wind.

Players had eight levels to complete in order to beat Contra, and if you could beat the game with just those three lives, you were the coolest kid in elementary school. Nowadays, many gamers are soft-- using save states, tool-assisted runs, and other girly-men handicaps. We should know...

Review Round-Up - April 2014

Strike a pose, Iota!
How about you vogue as well?

April of 2014 was a month dedicated solely to the PlayStation Vita review-wise. This past month we looked into six unique Vita games. No worries if you think we're done-- there's more Vita-related reviews on the way.

We started things off this month by joining the Hot Shots crew on the links with Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational. The steep difficulty in later ranks made us a little agitated, but the game still received a great score of 7.5. Then we traded are golf clubs for go-karts with ModNation Racers: Road Trip. Some performance issues and a lack of online play were some detracting features from the game, but it still placed near the front of the pack with a score of 8.0. We then ventured from light and colorful to dull and drab with Resistance: Burning Skies. It makes a great case for first-person shooters on the Vita, but the game just isn't that fun to play. We gave it a middle of the road score, a 5.0. Super Monkey Banana: Banana Splitz did some things to right the struggling-in-quality franchise, but a poorly designed difficulty curve soiled our fun, giving the game a score of a 6.5. Finally, we tackled the two best games of the month, Tearaway (9.25) and LittleBigPlanet PS Vita (9.5), our game of the month.

Since we devoted an entire month to the PlayStation Vita, it's only fair we devote a month to its competition, the Nintendo 3DS. Look forward to reviews of Mario Golf: World Tour, Kirby: Triple Deluxe, and Disney Magical World, to name a few!

Hot Shots Golf: World Invitational (PS3, Vita) - 7.5
ModNation Racers: Road Trip (Vita) - 8.0
Resistance: Burning Skies (Vita) - 5.0
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz (Vita) - 6.5
Tearaway (Vita) - 9.25
LittleBigPlanet PS Vita (Vita) - 9.5

LittleBigPlanet PS Vita is without question
the best original game the Vita has to offer.

Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz (Vita) Review

For our fourth review for this PlayStation Vita-centric month of reviews, we have a series that has been down in quality for some time now. Still, we cannot help by look back and hold fond memories to better times for the series. This Vita exclusive, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz, hopes to greatly improve the series' recent quality. Does it do it? Phil has the answer.

By No Means the Top Banana

Two of my favorite GameCube games from the system came from the now defunct Amusement Vision: Super Monkey Ball and its sequel, Super Monkey Ball 2. The two games had just enough challenge and creativity to make an impact and have an admirable amount of sales. However, over the past decade, the Super Monkey Ball series has seen one average to mediocre game after another. That said, Sega is at it once again with Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz, a PlayStation Vita exclusive entry in the franchise. While this entry in the series is closer in quality to the GameCube originals than titles like Super Monkey Ball 3D and Super Monkey Ball: Touch & Roll, Banana Splitz still doesn't reach greatness.

Aiai is frightened. He's obviously
having an out-of-body experience.

Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz's main mode, just like every other Super Monkey Ball game, is the Challenge mode. Here you guide your monkey in a ball through various stages, evading obstacles, avoiding falling off the stage, collecting bananas, and reaching the goal gate before time runs out. 

The beginner stages introduce the basic gameplay concepts of Banana Splitz rather well. Sure, these levels can seem insultingly easy, but they're a good refresher for those who are a bit rusty or new to the Super Monkey Ball series. Most of these stages have an abundance of walls, few places to fall off, and a lot of bananas to give players easy 1UP's, gained after collecting 30 bananas.

The introductory stages present the
player with plenty of protective walls.

Then once the beginner stages are completed, you can move onto the normal stages. Instead of just ten stages to trek through, there are now thirty. There's less in the way of walls to save your rolling monkey ball from falling, more moving platforms, pinball-like bumpers, and tricky, sometimes narrower paths for your monkey to take. 

The normal stages require
a bit more skill to complete.

What comes after normal are the advanced stages. These are made up of fifty total levels, as well as one ridiculous jump in difficulty between the stages of normal and the stages of advanced. There's a lot of trial and error involved, there's more than enough places where you will lose lives on a swift basis, and there's plenty of unforgiving level design to make you clench your teeth and want to chuck your Vita across the room.

This mode would be great with unlimited continues, right? You'd think since you go from thirty average in difficulty levels to fifty nightmarish levels in comparison, that you'd get a reprieve. Unfortunately, you only earn the ability to have unlimited continues after you beat advanced mode. Yes, this means you must complete all fifty arduous stages of advanced with a set amount of lives and continues, all of which can be spent through rather quickly. It's a very puzzling design choice that means a lot of players will most likely be stuck in the advanced stages and never see the rest of the stages Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz has to offer.

A diet purely of bananas can't be that
healthy for you, can it, little monkey?

In order to control your monkey's escapades across various stages, you can opt to use the left analog stick or go bold with the gyro controls of the Vita. The latter is way too underdeveloped to be relied upon, especially in later levels. When you have to tilt the Vita towards you to slow down, the screen sort of makes it challenging to see what's happening on the screen, unless you're a contortionist. 

Furthermore, the promisingly titled Edit Mode is another disappointment in Banana Splitz. One would imagine creating their own Monkey Ball stages manually, making exactly what they want. Instead, what you get is a mode where you take a picture of an object (and even now I doubt taking a picture even matters), and then shaking the Vita system to create a random, cookie-cutter stage that is as basic and boring as vanilla ice cream. 

Push your creativity to the limi--
actually, push it to the side.

Outside of the typical Monkey Ball challenges, Banana Splitz comes with a party mode, available for solo runs against the computer or battles with other players. A returning favorite in Monkey Target, where the goal is to take your flying monkey ball and land it on a target with multiple areas worth varying amounts of points, is present and accounted for in Banana Splitz, and it's one of the better mini-games in this package.

Another enjoyable mode includes Battle Billiards, a four player mode where opponents take turns hitting their colored balls into others in order to try to hit them into holes for points. There's also a Love Maze game with the goal of controlling two monkeys through an obstacle course, trying to keep the romantic chain between the two from breaking apart. There's also bowling, a number game where you tap a bunch of rolling balls in order, and a game where you control a ball and try to enter into holes, going for bingo in order to score points.

This is a much flashier setting for a
bingo game than a church rec room.

There is one mini-game, however, that is absolute garbage. This is known as Monkey Rodeo. It has you using the back touch pad of the Vita to guide a horse-riding monkey around an enclosed arena, gathering bananas. These controls are close enough to call them broken.  

Whoever thought this control scheme was
a good idea deserves to choke on a monkey ball.

Banana Splitz by no means pushes the Vita hardware, but the game looks and runs nicely all the same. There's nothing that really repulses the eyes in the game. Everything is suitably colorful, and the different animations of Aiai and friends are remarkably charming. The music is hit or miss. There's really nothing I can remember after extended sessions of playing Banana Splitz. That said, the music isn't grating either, so at least there's that.

With Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz, Sega edges the closest it has been in a long time in resembling the glory days of the Super Monkey Ball franchise. That notwithstanding, a ridiculous and highly frustrating leap in difficulty between the normal and advanced stages makes it hard to recommend this game to everyone. Despite its welcoming visual style and wackiness, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz is a Monkey Ball journey for experts only. For most, the majority of stages will never be seen because the game is just too hard and a lot of skill and a little luck is required. Still, while Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz slips on a proverbial banana peel and stumbles a little bit, it by no means falls flat on its face.

[SPC Says: 6.5/10]