In fact, if you’re someone who thinks that only physically challenging games are worth your time then you might want to stop reading at this point. (For legal reasons, don’t actually do any of that.) That should make reaching the end of the game much more of a challenge than a lives system. Honestly, I don’t see how lives could have improved this experience, but if you’re really into being challenged, just promise yourself that every 5 deaths you’ll smash yourself over the head with a very large book. Many fans have claimed that the lives were part of the challenge, and taking them out completely wasn’t the way forward. The removal of lives from the game did cause a bit of an uproar online. You can retry levels over and over again until you’ve mastered them, and thank god for that.
Firstly, there’s no more live system that was dangling off the original release like a vestigial wing.
That’s not to say that nothing has been taken away or added to the original titles in Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania. This also means that the slightly fiddly controls and, occasionally frustrating levels are still here too. No jump, no extra added abilities or modifiers, just tilt the stick to roll in a direction. No matter what the game throws at you, the only move you’ve got is to roll. Along the way, you have to get around various obstacles, from fast-moving platforms to big holes in the ground or thin tightropes to cross. Roll your monkey around a level until you get to one of the end goals. This is, after all, the classic Monkey Ball experience. That’s all a roundabout way of saying that the game is still very niche. The new photo mode is a nice touch, not that the level geometry gives you much to work with.
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When you’re creating a game to be a re-release of popular entries from a series past, you probably shouldn’t be too shocked if that game only really appeals to fans of the series. A great deal for a Monkey Ball fan, but will it finally manage to bring the series into the mainstream spotlight? Probably not, or at least not on its own. You’ll be getting a huge amount of content here, all with the new HD lick of paint that we expect from re-releases and remasters.
So it would seem that at the very least, Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is good value for money. Jokes aside, this package includes hundreds of levels, over 300 stages, and that doesn’t count the extra unlockable levels or bonus content either. Technically it probably does, but since Deluxe was just a re-release of the first two games with some extra levels added, you might as well say that this is just the remake of Super Monkey Ball Deluxe and have done with it. You may hear claims that it brings the third console release as well, Super Monkey Ball Deluxe. Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania brings together all of the levels and features from the first two console releases in the franchise, Super Monkey Ball and Super Monkey Ball 2. Now with Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania, the levels of the first two GameCube titles are brought back with extras, nicer graphics, and more modern controls to see if they live up to modern standards. The series is mostly a mainstay of Japanese arcades, but in the west has gathered a quite intense niche audience, but never really broke into what you’d call mainstream success. It’s sort of been a similar case with Monkey Ball. That’s why no one will listen to me when I preach the gospel of Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg anymore. Sometimes, a series will stay really niche even if it deserves to be more popular.