TITLE: Monkey Balls...? AUTHOR: Anonyymi DATE: 4/08/2005 09:24:00 ip. ----- BODY:

Hello everyone. I really don't know how to write my debut so here we go. Also, this will shut Jim up for the next week or so, during which I will hopefully wade through more games and write more whiny rants (because whining and ranting is what I do best). Even though I promised to make a back-to-back review of Republic Commandoand Brothers in Arms, which have a lot in common, I'm probably not gonna at this time. Thing is, I liked them moderately, which is quite unusual, and I'm not a huge fan of praising games mostly because dissing the fuck out of bad or otherwise over-hyped ones is just much more fun, so without further ado I present you with the review of Super Monkey Ball Deluxe for the Xbox. Disclaimer: a lot of jokes about Monkey Balls have been left out. Add your own when it seems fit. (Editor's note: Click 'Read More... To read the full article. I also had to remove few tons of borked HTML so some of the article might have been messed up, so it's not Knives' fault if you find a typo. And it was John who was harassing Knives , really.) Super Monkey Ball Deluxe has a very simplistic premise. You control a monkey inside a ball, and on each level you play through you must prevent the monkey from falling off a floating platform full of wierd traps. The control of the ball is what makes the game's actual gameplay, which is pretty stupid considering that in the intro you see the monkey has the power to SUMMON AND GET RID OF HIS BALL AT WILL. Taking a more indepth look at the game's setting, the plot is about an island full of monkeys robbed of their bananas by the evil Dr. Bad-Boon. A crack team of monkeys engulf themselves in these monkey balls and go flying after him to stop his plan and retrieve the bananas. This being the best example to why the Japanese are raving lunatics because a) some of them actually set down, brainstormed and have fathered this concept and shaped it into the puddle of diarrhea it is and that b) the rest actually buy this crap, thus supporting the market for "Stupid Games for Stupid People". Of course, some stupid games don't make bad games, but let's face it, these games would've been much better if they were both GOOD and NOT STUPID. Gameplay has actually nothing to do with the plot, though, because even though the plot tells of a villian, an army of robots, flying monkeys and lots of bizzare locales, very little reflects on the gameplay. You never fight the villian or the robots in game, because you just roll around in your ball, and you're also not flying but rather rolling, falling and generally getting slapped all over the place. Also, there's only one monkey on screen, and the locales are mere backgrounds to the levels which are just the same checkered colorful platforms. You don't actually play in the world of Super Monkey Ball, which, even though very stupid, is very bad in terms of making the game at least coherent in it's own context. I mean, here you are watching these cutscenes, getting laughed at by your girlfriend, playing this really stupid game, and then the intermissions don't even have the common decency of having ANYTHING to do with what just happened on screen. Add the fact that the screen tilting is seriously headache and nausea inducing, the retarded singing and some nerve-racking difficulty at times and you're in for one annoying experience To make matters worse the game is short, uninteresting, extremely difficult and not much fun. It's not WORST GAME EVER, but that's only because the level design offers some pretty cool stuff at times, which is only noticable if you're not busy being irritated by the game's very intentional flaws.

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