A video game like “Super Monkey Ball: Touch &Roll” would seem to be a natural fit for the handheld Nintendo DS and its touch-sensitive controls. The whole point, after all, is to tap the lower screen and nudge a monkey (who’s trapped in a clear, plastic ball, of course) through various mazes and obstacles.
But someone over at Sega of America Inc. apparently doesn’t want this E-Rated, $29.99 title to be very fun. The controls are that bad.
It’s a real shame, considering how the excellent controls of the original arcade version and the subsequent Nintendo GameCube edition made simians trapped in spheres such a quirky, fun phenomenon when it debuted few years ago.
If you’ve ever played one of those old-fashioned wooden mazes where you pivot the board around to guide a metal ball from one end to the other, you get the gist of “Monkey Balls” – sans the banana collecting.
In this digital iteration, you direct a monkey ball through increasingly treacherous courses filled with roller-coaster curves, elevated chutes, moving bridges and unpredictable pathways to the finish line.
But it’s too easy to overcompensate and roll the monkey ball in the wrong direction. This usually led to my monkey ball falling into the sea below.
On some of the harder levels, where there are moving ramps and pathways that undulate like some sort of serpentine escalator, keeping my poor monkey ball on the right path was nearly impossible. After a dozen restarts, entertainment gave way to outright annoyance.
Beyond the overly sensitive and imprecise controls, I also had to battle some awkward camera angles that made it tough to see where I needed to go.
At least the three-dimensional graphics were colorful and ran smoothly. The cutesy music and sound effects? Let’s just say I turned the volume all the way down after a few minutes.
The included multiplayer modes and party games provided some brief diversions. In “Monkey Wars,” for example, you do battle with rival monkey balls first-person shooter style. Again, navigating was overly awkward and not very fun. There was some promise in “Monkey Mini Golf,” which again suffered from camera angle issues but could make for a decent standalone game if given the chance.
Not every game is suited to touch-screen controls. In this case, it’s like being expected to win a race in a car that’s missing half a steering wheel.
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