Things don’t bode well for Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz from the moment you pop it in your Wii and are greeted by what sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon announcer reading the game’s titles loudly. Like most of the game, it’s obnoxious, and not at all cute or funny.
The Gamecube Monkey Ball games were controlled by tilting the analogue stick, which in turn tilts the level your monkey is rolling around in. Once you got the hang of it, it worked great, but unfortunately the same cannot be said for Banana Blitz‘s control. Tilting the Wii remote to do the same to the level makes sense; it seems like it should be an improvement over the old control scheme, but after many hours with each, it ends up being less precise and the fact that it’s more intuitive isn’t enough to make up for that.
The game is riddled with poor design choices, noticeable from the title screen when instead of using the Wii remote’s pointer or directional pad for moving your cursor around the menus, you twist the controller left or right. This might seem like nitpicking, but it becomes actually a serious annoyer throughout the entire game. The worst offenders though are the design choices that affect gameplay. Firsts for the series, boss battles and jumping have been introduced in Banana Blitz. Both are clunky and unnecessary, and Monkey Ball was better off without them.
Made by a separate development team at Sega from the main game are the fifty “party games” (which I guess is a cute way of saying mini-games), for one to four players. If you were to choose one at random, odds are it would be unplayable due to the controls. Once fishing through all of them for the ones with decent controls, you’ll find that most of them are still boring and not worth playing more than once. A good example of this is the first person shooter mini-game, with Red Steel-like bounding box-based aiming. It controls surprisingly well, but Unreal Tournament it is not; the gameplay ends up being shit. The highlight of the party games is Number Ball, a game with numbered billiards balls floating around the screen, and the players have to point their cursor at them and select them in numerical order. Yes, this is competitive counting, and it may sound boring in description, but it’s actually incredibly fun and addictive.
The music in Banana Blitz is grating, painful stuff straight off children’s anime, and there’s no custom soundtrack support, or even any way to turn the music off altogether. Surprisingly (it’s a third-party Wii launch game), the graphics are the best part of the game. Many of the game’s objects and characters are beautifully cel-shaded, and the environments are cliché (jungle, lava, space, and ice worlds), but they’re colorful and always pleasing to look at as you whip past them and the game runs at a steady sixty frames per second.
It ends up not being a total abortion of a game, but Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz is really bad overall and isn’t worth your time. It’s very much a launch title, clearly rushed out to release alongside the Wii. The control is shoehorned on, and I wouldn’t even give it the compliment of calling it a tech demo.
