It's Super Monkey Ball 1 on the Gameboy Advance. There's a lotta pop-in, but the mad lads at Realism actually did it, it and it's impressive it for the most part works and everything is recreated faithfully. Even the minigames, Monkey Fight is still stupid fun.

Digital Control with Monkey Ball's camera absolutely kills this game (instead of speeds based on how you move the stick, you can adjust your acceleration rate with A to increase and B to decrease), it's not bad until some of the expert courses which really demand you work with the much more limited monkey. That one part of Expert 7 with the slope killed me so many times just because it was asking a lot to align my monkey and the camera with the slope. It's like Mario 64 DS but a generation earlier and with a less popular IP so no one's really defending it.

They worked with what they had, which is really impressive from a technical standpoint that they got this much Super Monkey Ball to work in 2002 on the GBA, but I don't think the GBA was ready for Super Monkey Ball. Unless you like the one level with the realism name, I'd stick to the console releases of SMB1.

Reviewed on Apr 12, 2024


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