Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania

no online multiplayer or much multiplayer even tho it looks like it should have it

You can be a monkey and roll in a ball all day and I think that's something good and something we should all strive for

I'm honestly pretty disappointed. It was nice to recognize and play a bunch of stages that I played from the original Gamecube version, but this one lost a lot of charm that the originals had. It's basically a generic, watered-down version of the original. The cutscenes in Story Mode were replaced with very boring and underwhelming slideshows (yes, the original cutscenes were cheesy as hell, but they still had charm), the soundtrack is hard to hear and uninspired, the mini games play horribly bad (especially Monkey Target), and it really feels like they cut a lot of corners. Even the UI is boring. Remember the UI in the original SMB2 story mode? You could preview the stage you were about to play before going in, and it had this 8-ball-style triangle of spheres representing the 10 stages in whatever world you were in. That was really charming, even if it didn't change the gameplay at all. As far as Challenge and Story Mode gameplay goes, it's worse than the original. Yes, the original is janky and very frustrating to use, but this game further limits your visibility, and you have to press C several times to get the mini-map to enlarge. Using the arrow keys to change the camera angle is sluggishly slow, too. There is also no incentive for getting bananas in the stages because more often than not, the game awards you Perfects anyway (which DOES makes sense for stages that are impossible to get a Perfect on, but not for ALL of them), and you also get unlimited lives, so bananas lost all of their value. It is completely pointless to get bananas in this game. They weren't that valuable in the original either, but they did give you extra lives if you collected enough of them. One of my biggest disappointments was that there was no credits stage after completing Challenge Mode. That's what made the original feel so rewarding, satisfying, and final, even if you breezed through it. They were so memorable, and this game simply doesn't have that. They also changed the announcer voice (nothing against women though), and it was very jarring. They also play many of the same sounds over and over again, because they removed so many of them, and I got sick of it before finishing three stages. The original didn't have a huge array of sounds either, but it was enough to not feel obnoxiously repetitive. Also, when you complete a stage, you don't see the next one way up in the sky above you like you do in the original. It's little things like that that this game is guilty of, and with all of them adding up like that, I overall felt pretty let down by this game. On the flip side, the graphics are much nicer, ESPECIALLY the sky boxes. Those look fantastic. I'll probably keep it in my library because it's the closest thing to the original that I have now, which I am grateful for, and I got it for 75% off for Golden Week here in Japan.

A questionable remake of very good games. This is the best monkey ball available on steam and it gets on sale enough to make it worth a purchase then, but you are missing out on the original physics and atmosphere. I don't know why they did what they did to the story. The cutscenes are downright annoying.

you can play as a sega dreamcast

I have never had so many issues trying to make a game work with a controller, and this game pretty much requires it :/

super wanky balls