Super Monkey Ball Jr. - An Honest Attempt

Super Monkey Ball on the Gamecube ended up being very successful as one of the most iconic and recognizable third-party titles on the console Sega decided to capitalize on its success the following year by releasing Super Monkey Ball jr. on the Gameboy Advance I know I kind of teased that I was gonna be talking about Super Monkey Ball - in the last video but since this game came out first wait a minute this came out after Super Monkey Ball - can't be right everyone thinks this game came out before right everyone things just came out before monkey monkey ball - yeah Sam yeah I need to ask you something do you think that Super Monkey Ball junior came out before or after Super Monkey Ball - wouldn't make sense of it j-mac Yeah right yeah it would totally make sense if it came after it came out before really yeah it's pretty isn't it away did it come out yeah it did come way I'm so way Tony didn't didn't it come out after monkey ball - and that was the fun night because it was a first game oh my god you're right I up the entire bear Aidan I need to ask you a very important question yeah do you think that Super Monkey Ball jr. for the Game Boy Advance came out before or after Super Monkey Ball - Game Boy Advance is a bad console no comment after that now we need your signatures that we can use you yeah that's going in the video you know what I would do for a Klondike bar what would you do Aidan a Super Monkey Ball good game see ok I guess not whatever actually think it makes more sense to cover Super Monkey Ball junior before I cover the second game regardless of release dates because this game acts more as a footnote to the first games legacy it's good to be able to have a more dry comparison since this game borrows heavily from that first title instead of being developed in-house by amusement fission or any division of Sega this one was developed by a company called realism realism and published by THQ which is always a real stamp of quality when you boot up the game for the first time it becomes immediately apparent that this is in fact a THQ production having gone through the same rigorous quality testing standard that the company is famous for the menu actually replicates the GameCube version pretty closely in terms of graphics and music but that similarity ends kind of once you actually start the game itself let's just say that this isn't exactly the ideal way to play Super Monkey Ball now you might be wondering Johnny why do you think that Super Monkey Ball jr. isn't the ideal way to play the game if you have to ask then you'll never know this is actually one of the more technically ambitious games for the GBA the console was technically capable of 3d but most games didn't really take advantage of that because it looked like so this game is somewhat of an oddity in the library they made a Crazy Taxi one too and that's all I'm gonna say about it but ambition doesn't always equal quality a realization that sets in the moment you move your left thumb to begin your adventure you'll find hey I'm playing on a Gameboy there's no goddamn analog stick you clearly have fantastic observational skills and apparently an anger problem one of the key fundamental aspects of the GameCube games that make them work as well as they do is the sheer precision that the analog movement allows you and while playing the game with an analog stick actually does feel pretty good not gonna lie the fact that you can't do it while playing on the go how the game was intended to be played is a huge point against it even with the stick it feels pretty imprecise at a lot of times which I'll chalk up partially to the game not being programmed for analog movement despite of course being a 3d game also the only official means of playing the game with an analog stick would be the Gameboy player meaning you'd be playing Super Monkey Ball jr. on the Gamecube a platform on which you could be playing Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2 so what's the play there's a couple others slight oddities that keep it from feeling quite like the GameCube games aside of course from the beautiful graphics the camera doesn't quite work the same when falling and the whole thing feels slower although I do still have to give it props because it manages to keep a pretty consistent frame rate and it is very playable that said it still holds the game back by a significant margin the GameCube games famously managed a consistent 60fps and well that's obviously too much for a gameboy advance to handle it still makes the game come across as very sluggish something that's criminal for a franchise like this so why would you make this sluggish frame rate coupled with the awkward d-pad controls turn stages that are similar to their console counterparts into something exponentially more difficult look at how easy this shortcut is on the Gamecube compared to the Game Boy Advance I consider myself something of a high-level monkey ball player so I didn't think I was gonna need continues just to get through the beginner stages several of which might I add are very similar to the console counterparts which I can breeze through with little to no issue but with a little extra effort I pressed on and managed to make my way through beginner without too much trouble unfortunately this game is lacking something else that the console version has and that's a decent difficulty curve something that I praised about the original Super Monkey Ball in my video on it is how the game slowly eases you into more and more difficult stages which helps to make things feel fair and highlights your improvement at the game one floor at a time Monkey Ball jr. on the other hand does not around when you get too advanced I noticed a pretty big leap already on the second floor which there's a lot of different types of hazards at you one after the other not much of an issue for someone who's been playing extensively but by the time you hit floor 9 advanced floor 9 what part of what I love about this franchise as a whole is the level design however difficult it may get it is almost always fair this floor has you move on to these ascending platforms pretty standard fare not so bad but at the very end of the level you have to take a goddamn leap of faith you can't see what's below you and it seems that no matter how much momentum I build up it just will not happen this about half way into the middle difficulty this is borderline inexcusable and really highlights how that special spark the console games have has not been brought over in terms of creative and intuitive level design this is another area in which the low framerate and imprecise control really hurts the game stage and a lot of others wouldn't feel like such if you didn't constantly feel like you were fighting against the engine itself I won't say that all the level design is terrible because it's not there's some pretty good ones here but most if not all of them are hindered as a result of running on this inferior engine levels that would have been memorable and fun and one of the console games are rendered as tedious and annoying here huh wait a second if you hold a when you're controlling your monkey you speed up and if you hold B you slow down oh that's how you beat advance for nine you just have to be going fast enough why don't they ever tell you this one of the few things about the original game that this game doesn't try to copy but really should have is the tutorial when I'm playing Monkey Ball the last thing on my mind is the goddamn face buttons do I have to rewrite the entire script yeah if I were less lazy maybe I would but you know and unfortunately the videos already almost done but I will tell you my thoughts on the matter my qualms with the lack of any indication that this feature is here aside this is actually a really clever solution to the lack of analogue and it definitely helps to provide more precise movement the framerate really fights against the speed-up on more complex levels however and it doesn't solve every problem but I do have to commend the team at realism for thinking of something like this it's definitely a clever design decision given that this game tries to get as close as possible to the console experience as it can on a platform that's clearly not built for it there are also approximations of several party games from the GameCube original no monkey target although given the hardware that's probably a good thing monkey fight is a good approximation and it actually feels pretty at home on the GBA the d-pad hurts the phone a little bit though and that combined with a lack of fluidity compared to the console counterpart makes it feel a decent bit harder than the source material also you can't punch the camera at the end so this port gets a zero out of ten Monkey bowling also feels fairly at home on the GBA but the already clunky physics are turned up a little bit more here it feels like the weird power meter moves even faster and that definitely doesn't help other than that though it's very functional and pretty accurate to the GameCube version some of the animations are really funny to look at though they try to replicate the victory animations from the original and it's admirable but solo and the pseudo-3d pins crumpling to the ground when you hit them as a thing of beauty monkey golf continues the trend set by the first two minigames and in fact maybe the most true to the console version in terms of physics and overall feel it is every bit as hellish on the Gameboy advanced as it is on Gamecube this is the one I find particularly impressive the full 3d courses are all rendered at once much like the main game but the framerate actually feels a little faster probably because you're not exactly controlling it in real time like you would be tilting the stage or maybe it's that monkey golf doesn't require you to tilt the stage hmm anyways this one holds up well if you're into hating yourself I mean monkey golf so a year after Super Monkey Ball jr. came out they actually ported the original game to the engaged yet the n-gage if you don't know what the n-gage is it's this weird smartphone handheld hybrid thing that nokia released in the early 2000s pretty big flop but weirdly there's a lot of big franchises on there although the n-gage game is called Super Monkey Ball I wanted to cover it in this video because if you take one look at it you can tell it's very similar to junior however I don't have an engage so I'm gonna need somebody else to talk about this for me very few people have engages actually but I've managed to track down two people who uploaded gameplay footage of this game in the past to provide a more comprehensive look and to help me talk about it so here to provide his thoughts on the game is ninja star reviews along with some gameplay footage from elven aid please go check out their channels in the description below take it away boys a lot of people put Monkey Ball engage in a similar vein of smokey ball jr. they have less in common did you think aside from both for the most part being plural adaptations at the first Super Monkey Ball game now both adaptations kill you when to assume what about one that the ever dozen starting off small on white junior almost every object in a game is fully rendered in 3d including even of bananas Anke just likes to be a lot more ambitious with the stages of ports over including the cube stage from expert and even the bowling red carpet from master this comes at the cost of the game's flame weight this game drops a lot of flames or in gameplay which is something I haven't seen happen in Junior another interesting change in the end gate version is that it has the voice speech menu option with the original it even uses some unused dialogue from the first Super Monkey Ball game [Applause] both engage in junior use the same control scheme consisting of d-pad movement and holding able faster movement and B facility or five and seven on the n-gage on the engage cover the controls feel significantly more loose and in junior for example if you want to make a tight turn on hang gauge we haven't in holding 5 to speed up and turn it's actually better to start turning then hold 5 otherwise you're turned away less moving any direction having a forward will also seemingly keep you from gaining speed which can feel really awkward playing engages engine is also significantly more floaty when compared to junior and Angad you are able to float across the sky as long as you have enough speed in fact we've been able to use the speed to go up over wall so you clearly were meant to go up this is in contest to junior when you drop a goal block at any point day off the floor you would think that the game being in portrait mode would be a big inconvenience but actually I didn't mind it that much maybe monkey ball doesn't need that much peripheral vision but a scheme didn't really have a spin conscious you in my opinion but the camera angle poses the problem its own the camera angle just isn't high enough for you to properly judge wheel on the floor and I'll just shoot the game is the music now it support a multiple one right shouldn't have the same music oh yeah you're right they said it has almost no music in the game at all in the entirety a challenge mode the only music tracks available at a jungle island music the main menu theme and a bonus song music the jungle song isn't even complete it's just a small chunk that beats the entire time even in different role themes the most ever engage games usually had no music but in this case that all gets worse because it's significantly more annoying than if there was no music at all speaking of lower themes is also a service it was a pitifully little amount of all teens present in the actual game to the point where both expert in and walkable master mode is the same or tech background this is also caused by on a stage as president the game there is 1050 canary 15 for advanced 24 expert in 5 for master for a total of 50 stages which is pretty embarrassing amount of stages even here the games like step and roll which although lacking in stage count still has 70 stages n-gage also tries to have a similar credit sequence to junior where avidin a fast-paced platformer jumping you just voter dodging balls in a cage wait grab bananas honestly it's one of the most boring monkey more credit sequences that I'm acquainted there just isn't enough to do the hide how up head if it really is so far engage is looking really bad right now there is a couple things I think that n-gage has been in junior however I do like the lower transition animation after each goal and mimic Super Monkey Ball one surprisingly well there is also but what else is good about it oh I love the box I blew tonight I do believe in key to some of the best box on the whole series it's just the shame that's attached to such a bad game there is one more major thing to talk about when it comes to supermarket engage forever and it's the minigames a common staple of each supermarket ball game even if the qualities have been inconsistent when their leases as you'd imagine the games and engage differ from the junior counter puts aside from monkey fight there are two ever different mitigating 2 monkeyball yes I did say two or two splits the way the minions like monkey golf and bowling you're absent for engaged definitely not doing it any more favors getting into the actual minions themselves monkey fight I really don't have that much to talk about it's essentially the same game as jr. except forward explained way and worse controls you can also only fight in the grass so a guy getting into some more interesting games monkey waits considering that this was a monkey Bob wanted not jr. it's a lot more ambitious of a mitigating choice to engage you were able to adjust the lap count turning items off and every typical settings for this mode a fortunately for this game there's only one stage two ways on which is just a basic oval and a grass view the basic shape it attract leads so it's becoming extremely boring which isn't helped by the extremely loose turning which feels wrong anymore precision racing for the original has been Kikuyu lost in this version you don't need to worry about the items since you can easily overlap the CPU ativy little effort overall this one is not that enjoyable and you'll likely play at once ignore it finally the last meeting presents monkey target which is that to a fan fee of a game from walkabout one so you'd expect that this version would be good right this minigame is actually the worst of the fully believe it or not they actually retains the wind mechanic and the optional item wheel for the original but this version lacks the water president and every target is just a square running down the ramp and swinging to fly feels fine enough what you expect for this version I'm running on the target itself is what a problem is doesn't matter how much you slow down I learned earlier most of the time you'll fall off the target even though it looks like you'll make it you will somehow still fall off the edge I also have no idea how they messed up this minigame so badly overall Monkey Ball hankies was a mess it tries to emulate elements of jr. while also pushing engage hardware and as though it's all it's a pulley running word scheme that makes junior grade least engaged look like trash this game didn't even have multiplayer in any capacity something that even junior did in conclusion just skip this game unless you really want to try it I want a complete Monkey Ball collection because the actual main game is only kind of good at best while junior is pretty consistently fun throughout maybe if they had actually spent the time thinking about how to adapt the gameplay of Super Monkey Ball into a spin off built for the Game Boy Advance or the n-gage instead of going to whatever lengths necessary to replicate the lens flare we would have ended up with a game that held up better over time but hey if you want some monkey ball action on the go and you don't have a DS or 3ds or Vita or Swift for a portable monkey ball both of these games are passable but early 2000s monkey ball has the potential to be far more than just passable and next time we visit this franchise you'll see how true that really is hey everyone Johnny here thank you for watching my video about Super Monkey Ball junior big shout out to ninja star reviews for talking about The Monkey Ball engage game and for Elva need for providing me footage he provided me what I think is the first known footage of the monkey target minigame from the n-gage version so that's really super cool of him both of them have been really nice really supportive and really helpful for getting this project done you can check out their channels in the description and I highly recommend it ninja star reviews has a review on the first monkey ball game that I'll link as well as some particularly impressive speedruns of jr. on a speedrun Channel those are also in the description and Alvan e as I already mentioned has some footage of the n-gage monkey ball game as well as numerous other end gauge games that you guys might find interesting also of note today a collab video that I did with my friend Eddie from Earth Course Studios came out it's about Pokemon the first movie I will put a link to that up I highly recommend you go check that out Eddie is fantastic it was really a privilege getting in to work on that with him and I think we're probably gonna collaborate more in the future be it on his channel or on this channel so yeah well I'm at it also thanks to my friend Wil for helping me edit this video as well as editing the last one he and I've been working on editing a lot of stuff for this channel collaboratively so he's a big help anyways thank you guys for sticking around this has been Johnny and I will see you next month with something other than Monkey Ball although I will be continuing with Monkey Ball - next time I look at the franchise see you guys next video [Music]

Channel: Jonii

Views: 10,779

Rating: 4.737864 out of 5

Keywords: Super Monkey Ball, Jr, Banana Blitz HD, Gameboy 3D, Sega, 2003, Gameboy, Advance, review, mini games, bowling, golf, fight, beginner, retrospective, Jonii

Id: 6KQPb9C0CYw

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 08 2019