Only on the Nintendo GameCube
Published by Sega
Developed by Amusement Vision
Genre: Puzzle 1-4 Players

Reviewed By: Tom McGuire

Super Monkey Ball (Released November 18th, 2001) was a great game, but within a year later, Super Monkey Ball 2 was developed and released with a boatload of 6 new mini-games, over 150 floors to play on and more.

Game Modes

There are single and multi player modes to be had in SMB2, so let?s start by talking about the single player. For those of you who are not familiar with the franchise, you are a monkey encased in a ball, and using the control stick, you tilt the board around like a 21st century labyrinth. But that catch is that the board may have obstacles like holes, moving parts and ramps on it. When I saw that there was going to be a sequel to the previous hit, I really was looking forward to this game. In this installment, there is a new story mode in which you play through 10 floors at a time, and view a little movie that progresses the story. Story mode can be good and bad; good because you have infinite lives, but bad because once you complete the floor, you can?t do it again to possibly get a better score. The multi-player mode is a different yarn. There are 6 new mini-games in addition to the 6 older, retrofitted mini-games to choose from: Monkey Race, Fight, Target, Golf, Pool, Bowling, Boat, Soccer, Tennis, Shot, Dogfight, and Baseball. All of them are OK, but not stellar games to begin with. The ones that really shine, though, are Target and Dogfight.

Graphics

The graphic quality is great in this game from the low-polygon, and the backgrounds are beautiful, as is the front end! One of the levels that I really like is: ?In the Whale? in which the background is like an underground city. You can watch the water flow back as the whale presumably lurches forward. Scenes like this really show off the excellent graphics.

Sound

The sound in this game is as good as the graphics are, although the voice acting gets annoying at times. This game apparently supports surround sound, so that is kind of cool. The music in the game isn?t as good as its brother, but it is still great; I guess it kind of lost that peppy ?Get-to-the-finish-soon!? touch to it.

Appropriate?

From a Christian standpoint, here is the lowdown: At the end of most of the cinematics in story mode, there is a 30-second magical session where the monkeys gather and all chant a harmonic verse and say ?The magical spell is Ei-Ei-Poo.?. To avoid this part, you can simply press the start button when this scene comes up.