“Must you take everything beautiful and make it dirty?” So said one character to another in last year’s Oscar-nominated dramedy “The Kids Are All Right.” But it could just as well be “Super Monkey Ball” fans asking Sega what it has done with a series that was once among the most charming and innovative in gaming.
The premise, as in so many good games, is simple: In the tradition of gravity-game granddaddy “Marble Madness,” “Super Monkey Ball” has you use your joystick to guide a ball from one end of a stage to another. The fact that the ball has a monkey in it can be chalked up to the game’s origin in Japan. The fact that the stages are — or were — thrillingly varied, from Escher-esque staircases to perpetual-motion mechanisms that seemed alive, can be chalked up to the imagination and effort of the series’ makers.
Until now. With “Super Monkey Ball 3D,” what were once experiments in physics are now mere obstacle courses. Rather than assessing a stage as a whole, the player’s main task is to remember that around the next corner is a bumper that could send them flying off the edge. Deaths in this game left me rolling my eyes instead of kicking myself, and at the game’s completion, which comes well before the two-hour mark, I couldn’t think of any levels I’d want to play again, and there were certainly none I wanted to show my friends, which was often the case with the series’ pinnacle, “Super Monkey Ball 2” on the Gamecube.
| ‘Super Monkey Ball 3D’ |
| » System: 3DS |
| » Price: $39.95 |
| » Rating: 1 out of 5 stars |
The single-player campaign’s near-nonexistence means the heart of the game is its multiplayer modes. First is Monkey Race, which abandons the rest of the game’s physics in favor of becoming another terrible “Mario Kart” clone. Can someone tell me why spheres would need wheels to roll?
The only other offering is Monkey Fight, which, like Monkey Race, has been transformed from an exercise in elegance to an incomprehensible 2-D romp that’s 100 times more chaotic than “Super Smash Bros.” and 1,000th as fun.
Really, that’s it? Not even nine-ball, which previous entries have? Maybe it’s a mercy. Given the sabotage-minded approach Sega appears to be taking with this franchise, they’d probably screw that up, too.
