Super Monkey Ball (game): I disagree with the critics

It's been one of those weeks for me - and it is probably starting to appear as though I am intentionally trying to find critical opinions and try to find a way to disagree with them, but I assure you, this is all a coincidence.

I am writing about GameCube a lot lately because I recently gave mine away to a friend. I brought it over here with me to Thailand well over 10 years ago, blew up the power supply once because I was unaware of the voltage difference, get a replacement power supply, and somewhere in the past 5 years or so I put it in a box and never used it. This time, upon taking it out of the box I realized that it was time to give it a new home. Anyway, that's a little bit of a backstory as to why I am writing about GameCube so much lately.

On to Super Monkey Ball

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This title was given high marks by most critics and is actually ranked in the top 25 Gamecube games of all time and I'm just like huh? Where is this coming from? This game was extremely repetitive and the sound effects while initially endearing become annoying really fast.

The game operates like this: You have a monkey pal in a hamster-ball-type-thing and you have to navigate them to the other side of each level by tilting the entire floor of the arena - IE the ball itself has no propulsion and is just at the whim of physics.

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There are various obstacles along the way, the most annoying of which is where you simply fly off the side of the board into the great monkey abyss below. Then some cute animation happens while you wait to reload the level if you so choose. This cute animation again, starts out as "awwwww" and ends up being "get off my screen" after you have seen it 100 times or so.

This game lost its charm for me after just an hour or so and I think i put it away and waited for other people to come over as this is considered a "party game." Normally my friends would lose interest in about the same amount of time it took for me to do so.

I kind of got a bit of motion sickness just watching part of that but it does a good job showing what the gameplay is generally like.

Basically, i feel as though this game doesn't deserve to be ranked as high as it is. I don't think it is a good game and am happy that i only paid like $8 for it at a used-game store.

3 / 10

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