![]() Each Challenge Mode has five different playlists of drastically increasing difficulty. You can also play Super Monkey Ball and Super Monkey Ball 2's Challenge Mode, which sends you through playlists of different courses specifically from the chosen game. These scenes vaguely set the stage for each set of courses, but calling it anything close to a story is wildly generous. Bad-boon, vexing each other with different antics. The narrative part of Story Mode is little more than textless, nearly motionless vignettes of the series’ various characters, such as mascot AiAi and villain Dr. They also have different visual and mechanical themes. It features dozens upon dozens of courses from three separate Super Monkey Ball games, arranged into sets of 10. Under Main Game, Story Mode presents the closest experience Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania has to a single-player campaign. Party Games is a dozen surprisingly varied alternate game modes based around different fun activities, with the option for multiplayer action. Main Game is where you'll find all the modes featuring classic Super Monkey Ball action. Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania features many game modes, mostly broken up between “Main Game” and “Party Games” sections. This is a game where, if your hands shake in the slightest or if you aren't good at making the most minute thumb movements, you'll run into brick walls of progression. ![]() At times, the game demands near-superhuman timing and precision several later stages felt like they asked for inputs so exact I'm not sure I could physically do them. You can use the mode to beat stages, but your clear time won’t be recorded as it would be if you completed them without the assistance.Įven with slow motion activated, some of the harder courses are nearly impossible to complete. Fortunately, you have access to a Helper Mode that doubles the amount of time you have to complete the stage, provides glowing arrows to indicate the best route you can take, and lets you slow the game by holding the R button to get past particularly difficult levels. You can retry as many times as you want, and levels quickly load, but that won’t lessen the frustration you feel when you’ve fallen off a stage for the tenth time within inches of the goal. If you fall off of the course, you must start over. Each of these courses must be completed in a minute or less. That’s on top of many, many narrow and sloping paths I had to precisely adjust my speed and direction to roll over. Several dozen levels later, I’ve rolled through a shifting labyrinth, carefully plummeted off a high platform, ping-ponged into a goal mounted on a wall, timed my movements to pass through a goal as it fell through a crack in the floor, and used a piston's inertia to launch me up a tower. The first stage is a simple green square that you tilt forward to guide the monkey through the goal. With creativity comes brutality, and Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania's difficulty curves up as sharply as any half-pipe. These combine into more than 300 different courses pulled in from Super Monkey Ball, Super Monkey Ball 2, and Super Monkey Ball Deluxe. There are also moving platforms, moving blocks, switches that can activate those moving elements or change their speed or direction, warps that take you to different parts of the level, mines that knock you off-course, and other elements that add to the challenge. ![]() The course layouts vary wildly and show incredible creativity, with slopes, ramps, curves, and incredibly narrow paths of all shapes. Courses quickly become complex, with a startlingly wide variety of contours, shapes, and active obstacles to make reaching the goal incredibly difficult. That’s it.ĭon’t mistake conceptual simplicity for design simplicity, though. That control scheme demands an incredibly steady hand for it to offer the same precision as the stick. You can also tilt the level by using motion controls if your platform supports it (Switch, PS5), but that’s turned off by default. The controls are just as uncomplicated: Use the left analog stick to tilt the level, and the right analog stick to move the camera. You can collect bananas along the way for more points, but ultimately it’s just about getting from point A to point B, with various obstacles in between. Super Monkey Ball's concept is deceptively simple: Roll a monkey in a ball through a course by tilting the world around it to reach a goal. Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is available on Nintendo Switch, as well as PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Steam, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. ![]()
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