The Super Monkey Ball franchise was one of the first things I thought about when Nintendo first unveiled the Wii controller last year at the Tokyo Games Show. I remember thinking that a controller that could detect tilt and yaw would be perfect for Monkey Ball. Diving back a few years, we remember the GameCube launch title and then-exclusive Super Monkey Ball, which introduced us to the concept of rolling monkeys in clear plastic balls through increasingly complex levels by tilting the levels in question. Of course, on the GameCube, we used the analog control stick. On Wii, obviously, we'd just tilt the controller itself. Lucky for us, Sega is on the same page.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz's main game, a handful of levels from which were playable at the recent E3 show, was controlled in precisely that manner. Holding the Wii Remote in your hand, the tilt you applied in any direction would be applied to the level and get the monkey rolling. Like Super Monkey Ball and Super Monkey Ball 2 before it, you had a short amount of time (usually 60 seconds) to get your monkey from the start of the level to the end goal. But unlike the games that came before it, Banana Blitz has added a jump maneuver.
The demo told me that I could make the monkey jump by pressing the A button on the Wii Remote, which was easy enough to do. (Apparently the option was also there to flick the remote upward, making use of the accelerometer to detect the sudden motion and sending my monkey into the air -- but not knowing of this option before I left smoggy L.A., I didn't get to try it out.) I imagine that new levels may have challenges designed with the jump maneuver in mind, but I didn't see them until the final boss. More on that in a minute.
I did get to roll my monkey through a handful of levels with nice side rails, obviously put there to let me get used to tilting the controller and the level. I discovered quite quickly that this was something I desperately needed. Rolling a monkey around with the remote presented its own unique set of issues. Due to the lack of centering feedback (you were only holding the level flat if you were holding the remote perpendicular on both axes to the pull of gravity; this is different from an analog stick, which you know is level when you release the stick and let it re-center itself) as well as the lack of edge feedback (again with the analog stick: you can't push the stick past the edge; the Wii Remote has no such constraints) I found it was actually pretty difficult at first to tilt the level with the precision I had refined in Super Monkey Ball. The lack of edge feedback in particular has one especially painful side-effect: If you flip the remote over, the tilt sensing actually loops to the other side, meaning the level does a huge crazy flip and your monkey is a goner.
Complaints aside, it didn't take me too long to get used to the concept of tilting the remote to tilt the level, and pretty soon I was whizzing through the stages with little difficulty, successfully slowing the monkey down by applying reverse tilt and rounding corners reasonably well. Was it better than an analog stick? The jury was out until I arrived at the boss battle.
Yes, that's right: Banana Blitz chucked a huge piratey ape at me with a glowing rear end. My goal was to roll around behind him and jump up, smacking his behind (aka his butt) and damaging him. This was a solid plan, except every so often the ape would swing his mighty arms at me, and I had to keep moving quickly to dodge and get behind him. Unfortunately, it simply wasn't as easy for me to stay on-course without the analog stick. Few others who played the demo fared any better, and very few got a butt-smack in; most boss-fight time that I saw was endless pitching of poor AiAi right off the edge of the level from the speed they'd built up and found difficult to control. Only one person (not me) ended up beating the boss during my time observing.
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz's main game, a handful of levels from which were playable at the recent E3 show, was controlled in precisely that manner. Holding the Wii Remote in your hand, the tilt you applied in any direction would be applied to the level and get the monkey rolling. Like Super Monkey Ball and Super Monkey Ball 2 before it, you had a short amount of time (usually 60 seconds) to get your monkey from the start of the level to the end goal. But unlike the games that came before it, Banana Blitz has added a jump maneuver.
The demo told me that I could make the monkey jump by pressing the A button on the Wii Remote, which was easy enough to do. (Apparently the option was also there to flick the remote upward, making use of the accelerometer to detect the sudden motion and sending my monkey into the air -- but not knowing of this option before I left smoggy L.A., I didn't get to try it out.) I imagine that new levels may have challenges designed with the jump maneuver in mind, but I didn't see them until the final boss. More on that in a minute.
I did get to roll my monkey through a handful of levels with nice side rails, obviously put there to let me get used to tilting the controller and the level. I discovered quite quickly that this was something I desperately needed. Rolling a monkey around with the remote presented its own unique set of issues. Due to the lack of centering feedback (you were only holding the level flat if you were holding the remote perpendicular on both axes to the pull of gravity; this is different from an analog stick, which you know is level when you release the stick and let it re-center itself) as well as the lack of edge feedback (again with the analog stick: you can't push the stick past the edge; the Wii Remote has no such constraints) I found it was actually pretty difficult at first to tilt the level with the precision I had refined in Super Monkey Ball. The lack of edge feedback in particular has one especially painful side-effect: If you flip the remote over, the tilt sensing actually loops to the other side, meaning the level does a huge crazy flip and your monkey is a goner.
Complaints aside, it didn't take me too long to get used to the concept of tilting the remote to tilt the level, and pretty soon I was whizzing through the stages with little difficulty, successfully slowing the monkey down by applying reverse tilt and rounding corners reasonably well. Was it better than an analog stick? The jury was out until I arrived at the boss battle.
Yes, that's right: Banana Blitz chucked a huge piratey ape at me with a glowing rear end. My goal was to roll around behind him and jump up, smacking his behind (aka his butt) and damaging him. This was a solid plan, except every so often the ape would swing his mighty arms at me, and I had to keep moving quickly to dodge and get behind him. Unfortunately, it simply wasn't as easy for me to stay on-course without the analog stick. Few others who played the demo fared any better, and very few got a butt-smack in; most boss-fight time that I saw was endless pitching of poor AiAi right off the edge of the level from the speed they'd built up and found difficult to control. Only one person (not me) ended up beating the boss during my time observing.