Super Monkey Ball Adventure (PS2)

It's a universally accepted law of comedy that monkeys are funny. Through the PG Tips adverts and beyond, we've always laughed at our simian cousins, mocking their intellectual inferiority and lack of sophistication, not to mention their big red arses and relentless masturbation.

Essentially hairier, less capable versions of ourselves, monkeys would appear to be fair game. So much so that Sega thought it'd be funny to render them even less capable by encasing them in large plastic balls. This led to the moderately successful Super Monkey Ball series, essentially puzzle games in which the enclosed chimp was manoeuvred around mazes and minigames in a thinly-veiled ape-based version of hoary old classic Marble Madness.

This basic concept has now been expanded into a fully-fledged adventure, replete with an entirely unnecessary backstory. For those who care about such things, it's a (very) loose take on Romeo and Juliet, with your chosen ape also charged with the task of bringing the joy back to five monkey kingdoms. Something like that anyway - to be honest, we stopped listening after the line, "we will never find true joy while we ignore the sadness of strangers." Keep it light...

Chimp chores
This remarkable feat of diplomacy is achieved by performing tasks at your leisure for the various denizens of each kingdom, and in this sense the game works more like a role-playing game than the alleged action-adventure, as you're literally running errands like a chimp. As for these tasks/quests, they're generally a little more involved than nipping down the shop for a loaf of bread.

For example, early doors you're given the job of returning several nests of bees back to their hives, something that involves bouncing around on a series of flowers in traditional platformer fashion. Traditional, that is, apart from the glaring fact that you're trapped inside a sodding plastic ball, with all the inherent difficulties that such a handicap inevitably entails. Inertia, momentum and all that bad science stuff comes into play as your hapless gibbon bounces around aimlessly, barely responding to your frantic joypad grappling. And this is one of the easier tasks.

Monkey puzzle tree
Nearby is a monkey guard who wants you to wake four other lazy guards who have fallen asleep on the job, their job being to keep a lookout from a rudimentary treehouse. Waking them involves using a cannon to launch yourself into a series of giant gongs, something that has to be repeated for each guard. One slight miscalculation in trajectory and you're in the sea, forced to start the task from scratch, including going through the motions of talking to the main guard again - although mercifully the text can be clicked through.

Annoying as this repetition can be, it's made immeasurably worse by the impossibly upbeat voice of the 'narrator,' who gleefully shouts the word "FALLOUT" as you plunge into the ocean for the umpteenth time. What does that even mean? In terms of the game it means you want to find the person responsible, tear his tongue from his throat and feed it to the monkeys as some sort of punishment. But that's simply indicative of the nature of the game, which is relentlessly chirpy in every aspect, from graphics to the music to the inane ape-speak that passes for conversation.

What's worse is that while everyone seems to be living in happy-happy-joy-land, you're having a genuinely miserable time, spitting out swear words as your plastic-sheathed monkey again plummets groundwards due to a minor moment of cack-handedness.

Chimp choker
The problem here is a disconcerting looseness to the controls that's completely absent from the PSP version. It's almost as if the design team didn't put as much effort into making the PS2 game as fun.

And the problems don't end there. In order to get to various parts of each kingdom, you have to open and close adjoining doors. This sounds simple enough on paper, but the reality involves using your monkey to rotate a slow-turning key contraption, not once, not twice, but ten times. It's not difficult, it's not challenging, but every time you do it, it's a couple of minutes of your life drained away sat with your thumb in one position watching the world go round. What's the point? Pun entirely intended, but you could get a monkey to do it. All we can imagine is that it's a stalling device to keep you busy while the next lot of scenery loads into memory.

Following much trial and error, once you finally do achieve one of the quests, there's no tangible reward other than a mumbled thanks from the ape involved, and the glorious fact that you don't have to do it again. Your monkey does eventually pick up some powers in the form of chants, with a combination of them yielding such treats as a giant boxing glove, invisibility, or suckers on your ball, enabling you to get some extra purchase on slopes. Specifically, they help you complete quests, including some that are simply mundane rather than toothgrindingly frustrating.

Thankfully you don't have to compete every quest to progress to the next kingdom, and once they've been unlocked you can teleport between them. But while each new kingdom does at least provide a change of scenery, the frustrating challenges continue.

Take Zootopia, the nightmarish scenario being a fairground that refuses to stop. Punching a few dodgems off the track is simple enough, as is knocking over monkeys dressed as cats in order to free them (and these are the 'normal' bits).

Flying monkeys
The frustration is rapidly ramped up, however, when a schoolteacher asks you to rescue her pupils, all of whom have grossly underestimated the buoyancy of their balloons and drifted off to sea. One of the flying sections, this involves splitting your plastic ball into two wings and setting off to rescue them, not helped by either your limited gliding time or vicinity to a giant rollercoaster, the slightest touch of which sees you plunge into the sea accompanied by the inevitable gleeful bellowing of "FALLOUT" as you launch the joypad into the wall.

Things aren't much better in Moonhaven, a city in the sky. Can you guess what happens if you're half a second out of time or an inch out of position? As least this time you're falling into the clouds, although the 'announcer' sounds equally ecstatic to report your demise.

When you're not attempting quests, there are of course the ubiquitous bananas to collect, which act as the currency of monkey land. Bananas can be exchanged for goods, albeit nothing that will help you in the main game. Instead you can simply buy unlockables such as extra levels for the party games that exist outside the so-called adventure. The classic puzzles have also been shoe-horned in, and you can teleport to them during the adventure or simply play them individually.

There is admittedly a lot of content here, and Super Monkey Ball Adventure is an ambitious attempt to broaden the appeal of the franchise beyond those fanatics who love the series purely for it's hair-tearingly annoying difficutly level. The charm factor is certainly still here in abundance. Ultimately though, it's simply far too frustrating for its own good.

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