I was in a Hideki Naganuma mood today, so I played this game that he contributed some tracks to. As a game, it’s fine.

Unfortunately I can’t link you to Naganuma’s Soundcloud, because while he used to host his contributions for this game there they’ve been taken down, along with so much of his work. This was a real downer on my day. Hopefully it’s available at some streaming site or other.

Anyway, Monkey Ball. My experience with the series is some of the Sega crossover games, and half of Adventure on PSP. Compared to that, and what I’ve seen of the original game, the course design here seems less inventive and crazy by far. I do like that the learning curve is more gradual but it’s rarely satisfyingly challenging either. As I think I said at the time, riding that line is difficult and will vary depending on the player.

Perhaps I should step back and explain Monkey Ball? You have control over the tilt of the hazard-riddled playing field, which causes your orbed primate to roll in the direction of tilt. It’s alternately frantic and demanding of high precision, which is a recipe for disaster. Your goal is to get to the end fast, and possibly retry for better times. Personally I just want to succeed and move on.

In this case, sets of levels have themes to them (eg. made of giant desserts, or Chinese festival imagery), that occasionally impact on the design of the course but are often just set dressing. Each world has a bonus collectible banana, which is a slight element of extra engagement.

The spheroid-encased simians are as cute as ever, and as usual the four mains are your playable cast: AiAi, MeeMee, Baby, and GonGon. Many more exist but only in the other modes. Most Monkey Ball games have a few extra modes outside of the Marble Madness-esque main game, you see. In this case there’s a mediocre kart racer and a mediocre platform fighter, neither of which grabbed me at all, sadly.

I have heard laments about the quality of most latter-day Monkey Ball games, and now I think I understand them. This just seems uninspired, propped up by a host of guest musicians, but that doesn’t make for a compelling game necessarily. It doesn’t help that the close camera behind your globe-enclosed catarrhines on the wildly skewing world makes for a disorienting, even nauseating experience, especially on the dinky 3DS screen (even worse if the 3D slider is on!). Needless to say, the option for gyroscopic motion controls also makes the experience worse than using the perfectly serviceable circle pad. My recommendation is to find Naganuma’s tracks somehow and listen to them, and forget about the game.