Watch your step, for you’ve just entered theGraveyard. Inside, we’ll be digging up games that have long been without a pulse. You’ll see both good and bad souls unearthed every month as we search through the more… forgotten…parts of history.
The Super Monkey Ball series began as a side project to create something that would generate arcade income without a large budget and bring more pickup-and-play gaming to Sega’s portfolio beyond racing and driving-related titles like Crazy Taxi. It was a modest hit in Japan, but a bigger one internationally and its Gamecube port became the stuff of legend. Originally set for a Dreamcast release, when that system fell, so too did its chances of a DC port and instead the GC was the destination console for it and that may have been perfect historically.
The Gamecube’s octagonal-gated analog stick allowed for a high degree of precision that couldn’t be replicated on the DC’s analog stick, and Nintendo’s system wound up being a perfect fit for the first two entries while also leaving other console owners a bit in the dust. It took a couple of years for the PS2 and Xbox to get Super Monkey Ball, but when they did, they got an all-encompassing compilation (outside of a couple of stages) that combined the stages of the first two games while also adding new stages into the mix. Super Monkey Ball Deluxe was in some ways the definitive way to enjoy the games, especially with it also being offered up as a bundle with Sonic Mega Collection Plus on Xbox at a $20 price point – making it an attractive point of entry for many.
Deluxe was an interesting title on the Xbox because there was really nothing like it on the market at the time. Later on in the early XBLA days, there would be the first Marble Blast – which itself was more of a Marble Madness clone – and that game itself was featured on the first Midway Arcade Treasures collection. Deluxe is laid out in an interesting way because while it’s a compilation of sorts, it does not have a clean-cut layout for each game’s content, so it’s a bit of a hodgepodge of content across a couple of modes. There’s an easier setup where you’re able to play through a plethora of stages from a certain type with cutscenes from the first two games playing to set the scene. Here, you can choose to get through as many stages as possible, but only have to get through 10 total, so if you have one that you can’t topple, you can skip it and still move on with other worlds to explore.
Deluxe was an interesting title on the Xbox because there was really nothing like it on the market at the time.
Playing on the Xbox and later on, thanks to backwards compatible playback, Xbox 360 controllers showcased just how different those sticks were from the GC. I enjoyed the series first on the GBA before grabbing it on the Xbox and then later getting the GC incarnations. While those controlled better than any other version at the time, the original Xbox controller’s analog stick was still up to the task and far better than trying to use the GBA’s d-pad to navigate. The OG Xbox pad came close to matching the GC’s controls and thankfully, the game was tuned with the stick in mind, so playback does feel natural.
As with any Monkey Ball game, mini games are a tradition and Deluxe features a ton of them, enabling a lot of gameplay variety. You can spend an hour doing mainline levels and then sink even more time into the side games. The most impressive part about them is how fully-featured they are in many cases. Monkey Bowling would work as its own bowling game and is in some ways on-par with Tekken Bowl in terms of how good a job it does at offering a full bowling experience.
Graveyard: Motorstorm Arctic Edge
The Motorstorm series became something of a system-defining franchise on the PS3, but one game that gets swept under the rug is the PSP/PS2 entry.
It’s hurt by the spin added to the monkey ball beforehand, resulting in merely aiming and power not being able to really maximize your points. Monkey racing is a lot of fun too and works as a truncated kart racer with power-ups to use and the ability to get a racing game session out of your system within the single game. Monkey Fight is always a classic and a bit of a sumo-influenced mode that excels for multiplayer.
Monkey Target is a blend of a Pilotwings-style plane, only using the monkey and the ball as the plane and wings and allows you to land in a target zone for a high score. It gets across some of the Pilotwings vibe in mini-game form and is an addictive mode, especially in multiplayer, since it’s easy to always do one more round and just try and top what either you or your friends have done before.
Monkey Shot is a riot too and offers up a satisfying target-shooting mode with fast reflexes. It very much feels like a blend of carnival shooter and rail shooter ala Space Harrier or even Panzer Dragoon with the patterns and should also please third-person shoot-em up fans as well. Deluxe blends some of the best mini-games from SMB 1 and 2, and unlike the Banana Mania re-release, keeps the physics the same as the GC games.
By doing that, I would generally recommend that someone start out with this compilation instead of Banana Mania. While that may have better graphics, it doesn’t have nearly as many mini-games available and the physics are completely off. Instead of keeping things accurate to the GC and arcade originals, they were changed and the end result was having to come up with things like a slow-motion feature and a guide function alongside auto-completing stages as an option just to make up for the stages feeling so off due to the changes.
Deluxe is hurt, just like Banana Mania, by having a strange menu setup. The content from two games is largely included in full, but instead of just having them separated by different games as you would in most other collections, the content is separated in strange arrangements that make little sense. Banana Mania would wiin out on the menus by having things at least labeled on a per-game basis, but Deluxe is still my favorite Monkey Ball collection yet and hopefully it’s something that’ll get updated to Xbox backwards compatibility down the line if MS ever revives that program.
