Aaamaazing: Super Monkey Ball

After the solid but less spectacular and more gimmicky Super Monkey Ball 2, Sega, in their hubris, couldn't help trying to force an adventure mode into their third Super Monkey Ball title. By concentrating on shoehorning in power-ups and a ridiculous story, they forgot all too late what made the original game so magical in the first place; the pixel-perfect controls and effortlessly masterful design. It was careless for Sega to do this with their most famous game series in their collection (something fast and blue springing to mind), but it was downright foolish to make the same mistake twice.

Successive iterations thankfully removed the adventure game element, but failed to capture the magic of the original by attempting to fit the controls to less precise devices; the DS touchscreen (Super Monkey Ball Touch & Roll), the Wii remote (Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz) and the Wii balance board (Super Monkey Ball Step & Roll). By attempting to do this, the gameplay has suffered as levels are made more simplistic to try to facilitate the wooly controls and the less patient audience.

It is a shame then, that I have to say that part of what made Super Monkey Ball amazing was that it started at the top. It has since spent its time rolling all the way back down.

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