If it was possible to unlock infinite continues without having to play through Advanced on a measly nine, I’d probably have seen this through.
TUMBLR FACADE VIDEO GAME MODS
Might as well just wait and see if any of the Banana Mania mods pan out… They’ve sort of decided to make monkeys in balls make sense by creating a framing that the monkeys have been transported into the Screwball Scramble-esque toys they’ve been playing with, but on the Vita’s screen the entire thing looks so sterile, and the UI itself is saddled with big early-00s DVD menu energy with everything taking absolutely fucking forever to do.
Load times are so long, the controls are twitchy, the camera is infuriating (you can only move it when your monkey is basically at a standstill, and it wildly corrects as soon as they’re moving) and the levels–when they’re not just old levels, again–feel often as reliant on luck as skill with uneven platforms playing havoc on your plans (seriously, Advanced 10 is a lot of fucking nonsense.) If you’ve been reading my earlier articles on Xevious and the like, I admit there’s a simple pleasure to starting again from the beginning, getting better, but there’s none of that pleasure here. There’s absolutely no sense of difficulty progression (Advanced literally begins with you throwing your monkey off platforms trying to hit others you can’t even really see) and the game is sadly tied to a dated lives/continue format that would mean I’d have to replay it (I suspect) hundreds of times to see it through. The main game isn’t much better, with easy and normal tremendously simple and then advanced immediately hard. It’s so wrong it’s the kind of thing that makes you irrationally angry about shoving a virtual monkey about. Which is probably the perfect description of Banana Splitz, to be honest, a game named to be confused with the Wii game Banana Blitz (and its HD remake.) It’s been a while since I played a game where you can see them straining to use every gimmick of the hardware, but here they’re like “you’re going to have to use the touchscreen, even though there’s buttons” they want you to (but thankfully don’t force you to) use motion controls, and the party games have you using the back touch-pad (remember that?) the horrible fuzzy camera and even have you using the Vita in portrait mode!Īs usual all the party games are rubbish, the particular nadir having to be Monkey Rodeo, where you touch the back touch-pad to bounce your monkey around by pushing it on the opposite side you want your monkey to move. I have incredibly fond memories of getting the first Super Monkey Ball as a launch title for the Gamecube and playing it a ton, but I don’t even remember having particularly fond memories of the sequel, and everything else has been mediocre at best. I mean, is there a franchise that is as warmly remembered as Super Monkey Ball is that is as consistently rubbish? There’s quite a lot of Sega stuff that when you go back to you’re like “hmm” (*cough* Jet Set Radio *cough*) but they all tend to have some aspect that makes you still a bit fond of them, and the tend not to have been granted like forty sequels.
TUMBLR FACADE VIDEO GAME SERIES
Although here it’s “a bird in the hand has just as twitchy controls and uninspired level design as all the other birds in the series have.”
TUMBLR FACADE VIDEO GAME PC
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz (PlayStation Vita)ĭeveloped/Published by: Marvelous AQL / SegaĬompletion: Beat Easy, Normal and got nearly 20 levels into Advanced before I’d had enough.Ī big nostalgic throwback here to the early days of Every Game I’ve Finished, where the very first game I wrote about was a misguided Sega game on Sony’s similarly misbegotten handheld (in that case Sonic & All-Stars Racing Tranformed.) Not for any particular reason here other than I’d watched Game Sack’s not-so-recent video on Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania and it put me in the mood for some Monkey Ball.Īs I wasn’t going to pick up Banana Mania because of his critique of the controls (although there are, apparently, modders working to fix that on the PC version) I just dug around and remembered I had this, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz for the PlayStation Vita, and you know, a bird in the hand and all that.
0 kommentar(er)
