Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD

Like a lot of people, I was completely won over by Super Monkey Ball when I played it on the GameCube back in 2001. It had one of those simple concepts that pretty much anybody could get into, which made it the one thing my non-gaming friends and family members looked forward to playing. But as the series went on, I lost touch. In fact, I'm so out of the loop that I was genuinely shocked to see that Sega had released nearly twenty installments on everything from the Xbox to the N-Gage to the PS Vita. That's why I was excited to jump into Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD, an upgraded version of a Wii game first released in 2006. I figured that this would be a great way to catch up on at least one of the sequels I missed, but what I got instead was a gigantic reminder of why I lost interest in the franchise to begin with.

Looking back on it now, it's easy to see why I skipped Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz in 2006. Not only was it a launch game for the Wii that received largely mixed reviews, but it was also one of those games that forced players to use the remote's unwieldy motion controls. I've never been a big fan of motion controls, so the idea of playing a better-looking version using a standard analog stick definitely piqued my interest.

For better or worse, this is a mostly faithful port of the 13-year-old Wii game. There's a vague story here about a pirate villain named Captain Crabuchin who has stolen the Golden Banana Bunch, but it's mostly just there to get you into rolling around one-hundred single-player stages and taking on a new batch of dangerous bosses. And just like every other Monkey Ball game, you'll also have a chance to try your luck against your friends and enemies in a bunch of fun multiplayer mini-games. It's basically everything you expect from the series, only now in high-definition.

Don't worry if you've never played a Super Monkey Ball game before, because the concept is surprisingly simple. This is a game about rolling a large monkey-filled ball through a series of increasingly complicating platforming stages in an effort to find the exit portal. The trick is that you're not directly controlling the ball, but rather the table it's sitting on. It's a lot like one of those marble mazes, where you have to move the whole board around in order to get anywhere.

This concept starts out simple enough, but it won't take long before you're dodging enemies and forced to jump over bottomless pits. A lot of the game comes down to carefully navigating through narrow passages and finding the safest path to the exit door. You'll pick up floating bananas along the way, which is how you'll earn extra lives. And you're going to need those extra lives, because the back-half of this game is punishing. The once bite-sized stages begin to grow longer and more complicated, forcing you to perfectly time your jumps and successfully avoid every new obstacle.

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Each world ends with a massive boss battle, which is the highlight of the single-player experience. While a few of them are more frustrating than fun, I liked that each of them required something different of you. This isn't one of those games where every boss is exactly the same, and you'll need to use some actual strategy to beat the baddies towards the end. Sometimes it's all about hitting a weak spot, while other times the boss will be an entire airship you have to roll across. Both with the bosses and the level designs, there's a nice variety of levels in the single-player mode.

The same can be said about the multiplayer mini-games, where Super Monkey Ball shifts focus away from platforming and tries its hand at ten different genres. Do you want to snowboard? Well, you can do that in Banana Blitz HD. You can also aim at targets, race around the ice, collect bananas in a 2D version of the game and even go up against a bunch of spaceships in a weird shoot 'em up. You can go through each of these games solo, but they are at their best when played with up to four people in the same room.

It was while playing through the mini-games that I was reminded that this was originally designed with the Wii's motion controller to be front and center. The result is a number of mini-games that don't make as much sense when using the standard pad and analog stick. A good example of that is when you're playing a Monkey Ball variation on Wack-A-Mole. I get the feeling that this would be a whole lot easier to manage if you were simply pointing and moving the remote through the air, because the way it's implemented here makes it almost unplayable.

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The good news is that the analog controls work a lot better when playing through the one-hundred single-player stages. It basically controls exactly like what I remember from the original GameCube version, which brought me right back to where I was in 2001. Considering that most of the reviews complained about the forced motion controls, this seems to be a big improvement over the original. If you're somebody who loved the content in the Wii original but hated the finicky gameplay, then I can see this HD port being a welcome upgrade.

For me, I quickly lost interest in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD. It's not that it's a bad game, but rather that it's short and not very deep. While a hundred stages may sound like a bunch, most can be completed in less than a minute. I managed to speed through the single-player campaign in a single sitting, and none of the all-too-brief mini-games were able to hold my attention for long. I felt like I had seen and done everything after only a couple hours, which is made even worse by the $40 asking price. I might be more forgiving if this was a ten- or fifteen-dollar download, but the price is far too high for what you get here.

The good news is that this high-definition Banana Blitz looks great on the modern systems. The simple and clean graphics have aged well, and I like how each of the worlds looks completely different. There are also some welcome new additions, such as a mini-game decathlon and online leaderboards. This is a port that makes me wonder what Sega could do if they created a new Monkey Ball game using today's technology instead of simply re-releasing an older version. They could take the series into Virtual Reality or just add a little more depth to the levels and gameplay. No matter what, the longtime fans of the series deserve something meatier than Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD.