Super Monkey Ball Adventure, unlike the other new Monkey Ball game, Banana Blitz, was quite possibly the worst game that I took time to play at E3. Instead of tilting the level as in previous games, you control the motion of the monkey balls directly, like a standard adventure game. The monkeys can learn chants which allow them to give their balls different abilities such as the hang glider or boxing glove abilities from the minigames in the original games. The ideas are good, but the execution left something to be desired.

The main game starts out in AiAi’s village, located on an island. There wasn’t a lot to do there at first, just roll around and talk to monkeys. I ran across an enemy, which spun around blocking a path. He eventually got dizzy, after which I was able to knock him out of the way. Next, I came across a set of portals, each with a stage that had to be completed in order to unlock a door. Each stage contained a Monkey Ball level, such as one where players must roll over hills. A more interesting stage had the monkey rolling down several platforms in order to reach the goal. The adventure mode was somewhat tedious, though I suppose a long adventure game can’t be fully appreciated in a short preview session.

The game features minigames, just like its predecessors. Many of these games are modifications of previous games, such as Monkey Boxing and Monkey Target. Unfortunately, these modes actually ended up making the overall experience worse. I realize that the game is not complete yet, but I have never experienced such abysmal loading times in a GameCube game. After taking what seemed like forever to load, the animated “Loading" logo actually froze, and took quite a while longer to complete loading. Even worse, after the completion of each minigame, the loading process started all over.

Super Monkey Ball Adventures serves as a reminder that outsourcing games is not always a good idea. While the original Monkey Ball games were developed by Amusement Vision, this game by Traveller’s Tales continues the latter company’s tradition of diluting a good Sega franchise. I only hope that the game improves significantly before its final release.