i have almost definitely sullied my experience with this game by playing the PS2 version which is notorious for how ass it is compared to the OG xbox version. so many loading screens, which is a bummer and a hell of a step down when you're used to the immediacy of the original gamecube versions. the combination of levels from 1 and 2 makes for a hefty challenge when it comes to the arcade mode, one which is not great given how imprecise a PS2 analog stick is compared to a GC analog stick. furthermore, the new stages they've added into deluxe are just kinda... bad? like they're all massive and gimmicky and have a lot of unused space on them. i might come back to this on the original xbox one day, but for now i can only rate what i played. and i did not enjoy it that much. it is fundamentally still fun because of how strong its predecessors were, but fails to add much of anything interesting or new. minigames are fun tho.

PLATFORM: Steam Deck via Xemu
GOAL: Clear Story Mode
PROGRESS: Up to World 6

You take a monkey, put it into a ball, and send it through difficult obstacle courses. Sounds simple enough, and even back when this game was a low budget arcade, it accomplished its task masterfully.

Really, not much needs to be said. The controls are responsive, the graphics and sound hold up well, and the level design is absolutely first-class. Don't let the high difficulty curve turn you away, for the game always feels fair, and you've got the Story Mode (unlimited lives and skippable stages) to help you practice. Admittedly, I'm not the greatest at this game, but I still have fun! And with Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2 smashed together, along with some solid new stages, we've got 300 stages!

I do have a few nitpicks with this game, though. The ball rolling sound is mysteriously absent, I find the combined challenge modes to be a bit too long, and AiAi is the only playable character in Story Mode when I wanna play as MeeMee. Also, as for Steam Deck + Xemu, World 4 doesn't run that well, and the FMVs are all black.

Still, this game is top tier, amazingly replayable, and solidified the standard that Super Monkey Ball should live up to. I'll say right now that the only reason I shelved this is just to swap over to the GameCube versions, but I'll still recommend this version to any original XBOX or XBOX 360 owner! (Just don't play the PS2 version.)

P.S. I know that there's a fanmade GameCube port, but the expanded Story Mode isn't present, and at that point, I'd rather keep 1 and 2 separate. Oh, and as for party games, I'll write about them in my individual reviews.

Holy shit I fucking love every single thing about this game. This is tied with super monkey ball one as my favorite monkey ball game. This was our most favorite fucking game to play on the old ass ps2 that we had growing up at the day care I went to my whole childhood. We would just spend hours and fucking hours playing this game, we couldn’t get enough of it even with how rage inducing it was. I really liked how deluxe combined the levels from one and two and added its own exclusive levels (I found these ones to be my favorite). I have so many good and bad memories with this game, it holds such a special place in my heart. This game is the reason why I love the monkey ball series so much in the first place and definitely made me who I am today. It pushed me to spend hours upon hours playing monkey ball one to perfect my skill and technique until I was able to clear expert on it and eventually reach expert extra (still trying to reach master to this day). I can’t wait to get a copy of this game again now that I have my own ps2.

There is no reason to play this over the GameCube versions. If you've been playing Deluxe your whole life, you've been doing yourself a disservice. There's even a mod now for SMB2 that adds in the Deluxe-exclusive levels.

On Xbox, the game is almost passable. There are some graphical effects missing, but the real issue is that the controls are much less precise and accurate than on GC. This is not because of the controller, it's a fundamental problem with the game code itself. You can use any controller, even a GC one, and it will still feel worse compared to the original versions.

Don't even bother with the PS2 port. It has all the same issues above, runs at 30fps, and has loading times between levels. It's awful.

What about Banana Mania? That has gameplay issues of its own that I explain in my review of that game. Just stick with SMB1 and 2 on GC for the best experience.

Super Monkey Ball Deluxe is essentially both the first and second Monkey Ball games crammed onto a single disc for both the PS2 and Xbox and it's just as wonderfully delightful as you'd expect it to be crammed with all sorts of fiendish levels to tackle.

Nothing pumps up the heart more like seeing Aiai in his monkey ball just teetering ever so close towards that goal, especially with the much more trickier levels which'll have you on the edge.

Combine that with all of the fun party games and you have a cracking little title that's definitely worth a look (although you will have to put up with rather long load times with the PS2 release).

okay there's definitely some issues regarding this version of Monkey Ball, but it's SMB1 and SMB2 on one disc, can't go wrong with that.

almost all the SMB1 and SMB2 levels are here (except for the GameCube one for obvious reasons) as well as some new levels from a scrapped SMB3. granted the new ones aren't as interesting as the first two game's levels, but they're still neat.

Story Mode is still here but now SMB1 levels have been added. On top of that, you still only need to complete 10 for a world, which means there's lot of variety on how you can tackle worlds. Challenge Mode got seriously buffed though, 40 levels in Beginner?! damn no hand holding here, this is a man's game

all of the party games from the first two are here at the get-go. you can also choose the SMB1 style or the SMB2 style for the first game's party games which is really dang cool. having all the party games here is definitely my favorite part of the game.

but let's get into those problems. the first game's party game music is missing and that's a big shame. some of the SMB1 music got shuffled too. Arctic stages now use the Sky music, Extra stages now use the Arctic music, and the original Extra music is straight up gone for some reason. some of the ball SFX are gone too for no reason whatsoever. Challenge Mode is also ridiculously long compared to the first two games. you could make it easier by using Play Points for more lives, but for some reason they changed it so that you gain lives randomly! this is definitely a big hit to Challenge Mode, as being able to buy move lives the more you play worked so well, having it being reduced to RNG straight up sucks. cutscenes are prerecorded videos here and they look pretty washed out. also the PS2 version is terrible lol. 30 FPS, missing textures, messed up backgrounds, loading times at every single possibility, I could go on but we'd be here for hours. playing on Xbox 360 ain't perfect either, some levels lag as well as the cutscene dialogue, leading to unintentionally funny moments.

despite those negatives though, I'd still recommend you to get this game if you can't play the GameCube versions, especially if you enjoy the party games. just make sure you get the original Xbox version unless you like watching loading screens.

The story mode is what I played primarily, so that's where most of my gameplay opinion lies. The structure and plot is identical to SMB2, with one exception: Each of the 10 worlds contain 20 levels each, as opposed to 10 levels in SMB2. It's also worth mentioning that you were required to beat all 10 levels in an SMB2 world in order to move on. SMBD keeps the 10 level requirement, but now the player has the freedom to choose what levels they want to tackle, thanks to each world having twice as many levels than the requirement to move on. I don't think it ruins the overall challenge either; difficulty ramps up steadily over the course of story mode, and players will find themselves being required to work past something they personally find daunting sooner or later, but now they get to pick their poison.

If you've never played Super Monkey Ball, and don't have a Gamecube to get your hands on 1+2, you owe it to yourself to play this incredible game. One of the best arcade-styled experiences out there. (However, if you do have a Gamecube, you're probably better off getting SMB1/2 instead.)

thought I was lucky to find out my roommate had this on ps2 but once I booted it up I was sorely disappointed... this is really not the best version of old-school monkey ball. this game takes all of the stages from the first two gamecube titles and combines them with the scraps from an unfinished monkey ball 3 to make a definitive edition built on the structure of the second game. menus are identical to smb2 as well as story mode, and all of the minigames from both 1 and 2 return. this is certainly strong on its face, but this collection is bogged down with numerous issues that make it a lesser version in my eyes.

the performance is probably the most notable downgrade from the original, at least for the ps2 version (the xbox version is better as far as I can tell but I don't have a copy). framerate is cut down to 30 fps from the original 60 fps, and it's not a particularly stable 30 fps either. while this is always an annoyance in a ported game, it's an especially crucial change for monkey ball, where the level of precision is noticably reduced at a lower framerate. many lighting effects and textures were removed, most notably the wavy bonus stage and the AV logo extra stage from smb1. in some cases there's no texture replacement at all with solid color being used instead, and even when textures are retained they seem downsampled with an ugly grainy look. load times are excruciating, with noticable hangs between stages in challenge mode and most egregiously between stage selections in story mode. in fact, the story mode menu feels like a pre-release build, with frequent chugging and the aforementioned multi-second hangs while moving the cursor between levels. there also isn't progressive scan support that I could find within the game, and even over component cables the game looks like a blurry mess sometimes compared to the clean look of the gamecube titles.

to incorporate all of the new levels, each of the challenege courses has been lengthened considerably. while isn't necessarily bad, it does make every single course way longer than it probably should have been. beginner runs in the original games were generally 10 levels with some more extra stages on top (three for the original and 10 for the second game), whereas beginner here is 40 levels initially and then another 20 extra stages. on higher difficulties the level count is even higher, and it's just so draining to play through all of these; I wish they had something like the upcoming remake where you can play the beginner/advanced/expert/master courses for their respective games individually. the new levels themselves aren't equally spread throughout the courses either: it seems like nearly half of the beginner/beginner extra stages are deluxe-exclusive, with some more being in advanced and precious few being in expert. this left me pretty much unwilling to sit through all of expert like I would have otherwise, as I already played through all these levels before in a much better format. this is especially compounded by the fact that additional lives per continue seem much more inscrutable to receive versus paying for them with play points in smb2. I've seen different methods online for getting them but I only managed to get one extra one via story mode (in the middle no less, not after completing the story) and none via challenge mode, and without the easy potential to max out lives it makes getting a 1cc through an obscene amount of levels that much harder.

the new levels are pretty solid however, with the design philosophy of the unfinished third game being more about larger, complicated levels without as many moving-object gimmicks as the second game. levels like scrolls or cliffs are legitimately new ideas for the series, and I'm glad these deluxe levels will be returning in the remake. with this in mind, I was disappointed that there were virtually no new stages for the entire second half of story mode. this mode is a little easier now as you only need to finish half the stages in a given world to progress, but it was still a chore thanks to all of the performance issues and load times, and I would've appreciated some new content strewn throughout to give it more of a draw. another quick note I wanted to make: some of the levels are reversed this time around it seems? I noticed a couple times that levels from the first game would start their cycles on a different place than usual: for example pirates from smb1 where the sliding platforms now slide to the left first rather than the right. a really noticeable example is mixer (also from smb1), where the bars now rotate in the opposite direction from their prior appearance, making the level significantly easier (honestly not a problem in my book). there were also some physics and camera differences, but it's hard for me to tell how much of this is a result of the ps2 stick having a different feel than that of the gcn, or whether smb2's engine had differenes that are more apparent on the smb1 stages.

I just wanted to mess around with this one considering that it was one I always wanted as a child and the fact that it's getting remade, but it was a much rougher experience than I was hoping for. it deserves points for having this many stages as well as all of the minigames intact, but on ps2 the performance issues are just too much to bear, even on a CRT. I originally played story mode on a 4k TV, where even with game mode turned on it was a huge, painful slog. thankfully the remake drops the day after this review comes out, and I'm sure I'll have countless hours to spend grinding the missions and getting used to the new handling and level tweaks.