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This mode doubles the timer, gives you a slow-motion button and drops arrows on the stage to show you the optimal path. If you “die” a few times Banana Mania will offer you some assistance, which you can accept in exchange for a spot on the leaderboard. Then jetting forward and crashing into it anyway just to see what happens.Īs a newer gaming experience and repackaging of older titles, naturally you have some extra tools to help you through. It can be frustrating at times, but part of the magic is seeing something like a giant comb spinning around in the distance and wondering what the hell you’re going to do. Stage gimmicks will knock you out of bounds before you realize you touched them, the timer will taunt you for being arrogant enough to think you could grab all the bananas on the first try. It can seem easy at first, until the game quickly reminds you it’s an arcade-style joint and if you want to be perfect your ass needs to practice. Super Monkey Ball is all about moving a level around, guiding your encapsulated monkey, hedgehog, underrated games console or whatever through small, but intimidating stages to collect trinkets and find the goal. Related: Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania Preview | Sega Toybox Luckily there really isn’t much onboarding needed. Even if you’ve never played a Monkey Ball in your life, Banana Mania is just waving you into the party anyway. This is an arcade experience at heart, and you can feel it from the jump.
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It’s a seemingly endless well of Super Monkey Ball, smashing all the story levels of three games into one long story and offering all kinds of additional challenges and minigames on top of that. The play experience itself is exactly as advertised. Much of Banana Mania’s marketing has told us about playable bonus characters such as Kazuma Kiryu or Beat, with more to come.Įveryone is invited, including that one-eyed weirdo Suezo from Monster Rancher for some reason. If you get the Deluxe Edition (which was provided to us by Sega) you can literally play as a Genesis, Saturn or Dreamcast.
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The celebratory vibe runs all over this game, from the title theme banger guided by a friendly vocal lead to the treasure trove of unlockables and shout outs not only to Monkey Ball history but Sega history as well. It’s all Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania, and that’s cool. Story Mode, Challenge Mode, so on and so forth don’t call to individual past releases. This isn’t a collection remember, it’s a party. It’s a big chunk of all three games mashed together, gathering all the content together and ditching the separation indicating separate titles. The first three console iterations of Super Monkey Ball are regarded as the best, and that’s what we have here in Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania. Years later, Monkey Ball has struggled to find a place in modern gaming but has never left, its status as a Sega classic fully embedded in the culture. Now it’s time to celebrate that status with Banana Mania, a digital party sending up Super Monkey Ball as the unique classic it is. Sega’s arcade backbone is often understated these days, even when news of famous Japanese arcades closing after decades of operation is in recent headlines. Super Monkey Ball is one of the prime arcade to console conversions, bringing its absurd world and style to the Gamecube and turning into a popular series.