If there’s one genre of games we really hate (other than FPSs, sandboxes, shoot- ’em-ups, 2D and 3D fighters, racing games and everything else we review) top of the stink pile has to be platform games. They’re all annoying. Each and every one of the jumping around from platform to platform collecting numerous gems, coins, nuts and bolts and what have you, with the camera getting stuck on walls because no one can work out a decent way of letting you look about the 3D space of the game world without having to fight with either the L or R buttons or an analogue stick… derivative fluffy animal-starring games are absolutely no fun to play. And yet despite all that sheer boiling hatred we actually had high hopes for Super Monkey Ball Adventure, thinking it was a slight departure from the usual platformer; hey there’s no double-jumping in this game buddies. But you do have to collect a lot of bananas.

The premise, the reason why you’re about to put yourself through a gamut of frustration, swearing and wishing you hadn’t spent so much on a PSP (or that you’d got the PS2 version instead, because pads are much cheaper to replace after you’ve shattered them into a million tiny pieces) so that you could throw it at a wall is that Princess DeeDee and Prince Adeabe want to shag each other’s monkey brains out but because their respective monkey kingdoms are at monkey war, they can’t monkeying do it without upsetting some monkeys. So they swing off together and no one can find them. This somehow leads to the rise of the evil Naysayers invading the monkey kingdoms and blocking off parts of the levels which have more bananas littering the paths and platforms. To be honest you’ll find that you’re quite glad they’re there once your stress levels start rising and you start shouting in the middle of a packed bus causing everyone to look at you. But you’ll be so angry you’ll end up in a fight after telling everyone to sod off. Luckily we got to play Super Monkey Ball Adventure at home over a weekend and could ebb the frustration by attacking our house-mates.

Even one of the first challenges took about half an hour to complete: it involved bouncing on flower petals and huts in order to collect bees which had escaped their hives and had to be returned or there’d bee* no honey for the monkeys to put on their banana bread. It’s a difficult challenge made more difficult by the analogue nub and the general lack of control you have in the air over your monkey in a ball. Push it just slightly too far and down you go. Not just to that start of the bouncy flowers, but all the way down to the bottom (the challenge is set quite far up in the level) to the beach. This results in a tedious roll back up to the first flower to try it again without messing up. Then the monkey fell into the sea and cancelled the task. Ever so slightly further in is another task where you use cannons to aim the monkey at gongs in order to wake up sleeping guard monkeys. Shouldn’t be too much of a problem except there’s no real way of aiming it precisely and missing the gong means landing in the sea again, which again cancels the challenge. To start the challenge again means having to talk to the monkey that issues it and you have to sit while he explains the problem again, then roll into the cannon and land in the sea once more. We did hit it once, then realised there are three more monkeys to wake up and the next shot was instantly botched.

Eventually we got through some of the puzzle trays Monkey Ball is famous for and more of the level opened up, with more bananas and more tasks and more monkeys landing in the sea. It’s so annoying. Especially those damn puzzles trays, just messing it up and having to try and try again to get that damn ball into the goal. This game isn’t fun, it’s just horrible.

What’s not horrible are the multi-player mini-games and in fact they are a blessed relief from all the incredible frustration of the main game. At least you can batter your friends in the Monkey Boxing and destroy their monkey castles in, oh it’s just called Monkey Cannon. Whatever, anyway these wee mini-games provide all the fun in Super Monkey Ball Adventure as the main single-player game makes you want to pull the hair from your head for light relief.

* this is a pun and it’s one of the best goddamn puns you’ll hear in your life.

Tim Empey