Back in the 90s, Sonic the Hedgehog could do no wrong. That critter was everywhere. After Sonic 1, 2, 3, Sonic and Knuckles there wasn’t a lot more for Sonic to conquer. Well, except pinball. Yeah, I said Pinball. Some ad wizard decided that Sonic Spinball would be fantastic idea. It wasn’t. Sonic needed to stay to his roots, but we never learn from our mistakes, do we? Enter Super Monkey Ball.

SMB was a groovy puzzle game when it was released many years ago for the GameCube. It was a sleeper hit and spawned a sequel and even made the jump to other platforms (including a not so great GBA version). It was a modest hit in review land…apparently enough of a hit to get someone to say “hey what if we make this into a platform adventure game” and people thought this was a good idea.

For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that Super Monkey Ball never existed and this game was brand new. In the new game, aptly titled Super Monkey Ball Adventure, the…uhh… “Monkey ballers?” have to defeat the naysayers. I mean real honest to goodness naysayers who have removed the fun from the world.

In this adventure game, you’ll move your monkey ball to interact in a world with different people who talk to you and give you various quests that are boring in nature. Oh and don’t get me started on the “talking.” The characters don’t actually speak English; instead they speak in some bizarre language that’s the same no matter who talks to you. You’ll have to settle for subtitles. It’s really some great Game Boy era stuff. At this point in time, I think it’s unacceptable to have to scroll through pages of text in an adventure.

As you run around the world, it’s a traditional adventure game; you go from ‘zone’ to ‘zone’ and complete tasks. The bananas are still around and you have various power ups which enable your ball to obtain Katamari Damacy like stickiness. You can also go invisible. It’s an interesting idea, but it’s still tough to gather that you’re a monkey in a ball and everyone else in the world is not in a ball. I’d love to hear that backstory. Speaking of backstory, wait until you watch the story unfold – the intro is just plain goofy.

Don’t worry, in between restoring happiness to the world, you’ll have to go back into old fashioned Super Monkey Ball levels….however, they seem to be there as an afterthought – the mazes aren’t a whole lot of fun when compared to the original game, and believe it or not, they can’t compare to the graphics of the game released years ago, which is unbelievable to me.

The graphics are not very good – even using GameCube standards. Maybe I’m just addicted to my Xbox 360 these days, but the textures look very rough and even the text font when “Fallout” is displayed doesn’t look great on my TV. The load times between levels are not great either – while they aren’t PSP RAW slow, they pretty much do everything possible to kill any momentum. For example, when you go from one area to the next, usually I’m making my Monkey Ball go pretty fast. There’s nothing more exciting than rolling at a very high speed around a corner and then seeing a loading screen for a period of time.

The control of the Monkey Ball is also not very good. You’ll use the C-stick to manipulate the camera and the regular thumbstick to move your ball around. Using the laws of physics you can create quite the speed in your monkey ball…however the more speed you use, the more dangerous your ball is and it can “fallout.” Often times in the story mode, I felt rather nauseous trying to get the camera to view my character the way I wanted to. Let’s just say there was a lot of spinning.

Thankfully, in addition to the not-great story mode, there are other games to be had. There’s the always fun party game mode with six games, although monkey bowling is not one of them. I have taken a fancy to the boxing game. It’s rather silly with four monkey balls cavorting around with one boxing glove attached to each ball and you punch, but it’s cute. If you’ve played other MB games before, some of the party games will look familiar.

For old school Monkey Ball aficionados, there is challenge mode which is just the mazes (some of which you encounter in the story mode). Always fun, but nothing really new here as opposed to the other two GameCube games.