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One of the things that I remember from the GameCube's early days (and around that time, really) was how much product placement there was where there didn't seem to be stuff before. I was aware of Crazy Taxi and its references to KFC, but it was a bit jarring to see in Nintendo games. Whether it was Pikmin 2 and its Duracell batteries and beverage brands all owned by Cadbury Schweppes at the time (TreeTop juice was a separate company), or Wave Race: Blue Storm and stickers for Slim Jim and McDonald's...thematically it fit fine and it was still a novelty, but it was still strange to see. Super Monkey Ball (by Sega) was no exception to that with Dole-branded bananas to collect in every stage.

The game itself is very simple—you take a stage and a monkey encased a plastic bubble, and attempt to roll it through the stage, with the stage rotating as you attempt to move the monkey around, requiring a bit of skill and finesse to work with each stage. The lack of buttons for the main gameplay is explained because Super Monkey Ball was a port of an arcade game that was simply called Monkey Ball but released earlier that year. The other reason it's a bit strange that it IS an arcade port, something that once defined video games (when you look at the "second generation" video games, the Atari 2600, the Intellivision, and the ColecoVision, they had original titles but what sold the system was arcade ports, Atari 2600 went big with Space Invaders and started to die when they got the license to Pac-Man only to ruin it, ColecoVision ran with Donkey Kong, and the Intellivision got BurgerTime) but since those times was mostly Sega carrying on the tradition.

As a game to play single player it's not all that enthralling and more frustrating than fun, you have to have a sensitive controller to make it work with a practice, but I had fun playing it with my cousin, who hadn't played it in over 15 years. It was actually pretty fun, and eventually, we got hungry for the bananas ourselves, and lo and behold, downstairs there were a few Dole-stickered bananas. (You want video gamers to eat healthy? Do this.)

The title screen is taken from The Cutting Room Floor.

FINAL RATING:   

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