Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz

There’s an element of funfair giddiness to Super Monkey Ball that’s perfectly suited to Wii – brightly coloured, garish in fact, but with charm that bowls you over.

The main game consists of rolling a ball (containing monkey) around a series of increasingly tricky obstacle courses. Your aim is to reach the ‘goal’, but there are bonus points for collecting bananas. If this doesn’t strike you as simple good fun you’ll never know what is. You only need one hand to guide the ball using the remote so you can sit back and complete a few levels, or spend a long session mastering a particularly nasty one. Whatever the scenario, the remote has such fine control over the ball it’s uncanny so any mishaps are strictly your own doing.

Aside from the main puzzle game, there are 50 mini-games to have a go at – all of them playable against at least one other person or as many as four. Anything that can be vaguely related to monkeys and/or balls is included as a mini-game – whack-a-mole, tin can alley, ring-toss, fishing, snowboarding, memory games, and so on. We can’t think of anything that’s missing here.

Super Monkey Ball is a game that needs no explanation. Give anyone the remote and they’ll know what to do, and immediately start laughing while leaning from side to side to over compensate for early attempts at this wonderful balancing act. When it finally clicks and you have it all in the wrist, you think you’re the coolest guy around

Back to Wii special