LogFAQs > #950515608

#26. Super Monkey Ball 2 (Gamecube, 2002)
I know all yall are gonna be up in Monkey Targets business and thats perfectly fine. The minigames are incredible in this game, especially Monkey Target, a simple game of rolling down a hill, launching, gliding and trying to land on all different kinds of moving boards to get points. Simple, and great. But theres also a ton of other really fun ones. Monkey Race, Monkey Billiards, Monkey Bowling, Monkey Golf, and Monkey Baseball are all really good too. The rest are ok or eh. But all these minigames can be great for their contribution to the game alone, and a huge step up over Monkey Ball 1s 3 minigames (including inferior versions of many of Monkey Ball 2s games).



But really, the draw for me, is SMB2s main mode - maybe not the story mode as much because that is kidn of disjointed- Id rather play all the stages start to end, classic style- although the story is uh, pretty damn weird. All the background locales come from the story, like a forest, volcano, what have you but it also involves like taking a bath with an evil monkey or something and getting in his washing machine, and getting cooked in a stew. I dont.

Super Monkey Ball is a game where you control a monkey in a ball through an obstacle course, getting to the flag at the end. The courses start easy and get insane, but hey, you can try over and over again til your hearts concern, sort of- actually this is the biggest reason I have this game over SMB1. SMB1 limits you to 3 lives per run (and some continues). You wont need them on the Easy course, but the other courses you certainly will. Monkey ball 2 gives you 99 lives, which winds up being a really good amount! This way you cant just completely mess around without regard for penalty of dying over and over you will have to start over if you lose enough lives. But its definitely an amount that offers you a good degree of flexibility, and makes it ok to make mistakes and learn from them.

This is a physics game at heart. Truthfully, you are controlling the WORLD, not the monkey, and letting gravity do its thing- but it really feels like youre controlling the monkey which is a neat bit of design. Playing around in the very wide variety of levels is incredibly fun, and trying to deal with all the traps and hazards. They may include rapidly moving goalposts, launching yourself into some basketball hoops, hurling yourself down giant spirals, etc etc. If you ever enjoyed Marble Madness on the NES, this game is like its logical conclusion. Theres really not too much more to say about it, other than the insanity of some of these levels, and despite a lot of them being really difficult, they always run really fun and creative, and I enjoy this style of rapid-fire physics-based obstacle courses.



Next up: You can play this game on Steam without having Steam installed.


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