Super Monkey Ball 2

Pros • Lots of creative levels • Incredible effort put into creating active backgrounds instead of just bland environments • Good dispersion of difficulty • Lots of mini-games, and they are competitive and entertaining in the right circumstances • 100 levels with a goofy, goofy story as reward	Cons • The magic spell is Ei-Ei-Poo! • With 100 levels, some of them are bound to, and do, grow tedious • Continued product placement in Sega games (all the bananas display Dole stickers)
Bottom Line Only Sega would take an idea so wacky and run with it; and run with it they have. Part puzzle game, part party game, all monkeys, all anal-retentive, Super Monkey Ball 2 is a game that has you barreling monkeys, in balls, through obstacle courses. It's a crazy, innovative game, much more complete, much more complex, with many more levels and many more mini-games than the original Super Monkey Ball. The mini-games, especially added to the 100 single-player levels (interspersed with the most bizarre monkey/Ei-Ei-Poo! cut-scenes you could ever want to see), make Super Monkey Ball 2 a worthy purchase, particularly since the puzzle solving/precision control of the single-player game, off-set with the frenetics of multiplayer sports/combat-themed mini-games make Super Monkey Ball 2 fun for just about any one.

Someone at Amusement Vision is badly stunted in the anal phase of Freudian development. If it wasn't bad enough that their game is based around monkeys running inside of balls to maneuver about extremely hazardous environments, Super Monkey Ball 2 is full of cut scenes that declare "The magic spell is Ei-Ei-Poo!" which sounds exactly like what toilet training toddlers squeal for attention and praise after they manage to create wonderful brown goo with their very own bums.

At Amusement Vision they just revel in good ol' Ei-Ei-Poo! cut-scenes and monkeys, monkeys everywhere. And, while these monkeys aren't exactly jumpin' on the bed, they do very often fall down and bump their heads.

For you see, Super Monkey Ball is a game where you must roll your monkey from the start of each level to the goal by tilting the landscape via the thumbstick of your control pad. A simple goal much complicated by the fiendish, anally-stunted minds at Amusement Vision. While early levels are simple, straight-forward rolls to the goal, things rapidly complicate with bumps, curves, narrow bridges, and all manner of obstacles, from bouncing balls to spinning combs impeding your progress and knocking (you have no idea how tempting it is to use the verb "slap" or "spank" in this situation) your monkey to his or her tumbling doom. And, there is always the question of whether you should just speed through the level or stop to pick up the bananas scattered throughout. Then, it gets further complicated with puzzle elements, switches and sliding platforms, etc. Just when you think they've run out of ideas, they'll hit you with something new. Still, 100 levels is a lot, and some of them do feel tedious after a time. Fortunately, you don't have to play them all in one sitting, though the game is so challenging and damn compelling (you just want so inexplicably badly to get your monkey to the goal, and to see the next ridiculous Ei-Ei-Poo! cut-scene), that you play well past the point of enjoyment every time you boot it up.

Plus, besides the 100 levels of the main game, there are other challenges in Super Monkey Ball 2. Of particular interest are the mini-games. All of the mini-games of the original Super Monkey Ball are on the disc and are playable from the beginning (Monkey Race, Monkey Fight, Monkey Golf, Monkey Billiards, etc.), and there are six new ones to unlock (Monkey Tennis, Monkey Dogfight, Monkey Baseball, Monkey Soccer...). None of these games are quite as good as say Tennis 2K2, but the tennis game is nearly as good as Mario Tennis, and each of the mini-games is fun and good for lots of gaming fun with your friends once you manage to earn enough points to unlock them.

Really, Super Monkey Ball 2 goes a long way towards proving that you can have and generate for others a lot of fun by sticking well and truly in the anal phase. However, this seems like everything that ought to be done with the franchise. Here's hoping Amusement Vision knows when to move on and begins a new project instead of staying stuck and trying to squeeze out a Monkey Ball 3. Maybe Sega can spring for some counseling. Amusement Vision is definitely worth it.

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