Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania is out today.
I’ve found the media reviews interesting. They have a through-line of discussion re: difficulty. Granted, when reviewers are assigned a compilation of 3 arcade-hard games they’re probably going to hit rough patches on a deadline, but there’s something else here.
The quotation that went around as a screenshot from IGN’s is unfair to review itself but still alarming:
That’s exactly what happened in one of the levels that made me want to pull my hair out: before me stood a towering theme park ride made up of platforms connected to a pole in the middle. Because you can only tilt the camera up so far, I couldn’t see where the finish line was — instead, I had to roll onto a ground-level platform that thrust my ball upwards and try to figure it out in the air. The first time, I was thrown directly into a connecting pole and bounced off the map before I even had a chance to move. Other attempts ended after I landed on one of the higher platforms and bounced right off again. When I finally managed to land in the right place and stay put, it didn’t feel like I’d mastered the obstacles of that particular level; it felt like a lucky run that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to replicate. If only a few levels were designed like this it’d be easier to dismiss that feeling, but after the halfway point most of them start to feel this way.
And while the environments and backgrounds might be fun and colorful, much of the playable level design is repetitive and uninspired. The more I played past a certain point, the more it felt like a chore. What’s especially draining is that after finishing a particularly difficult level, there’s no satisfying adrenaline rush that accompanies overcoming a challenge — just a sense of relief that it’s finally over. Super Monkey Ball could’ve learned a thing or two from Peggle about dispensing serotonin.
Serotonin is not the first or second neurotransmitter I think of when I think about video games. But she also mentions a lack of adrenaline. So there’s a gas/brakes problem. Because of the arbitrariness of the courses and goals? The frustration? The linear progression through worlds? I wonder if norepinephrine and serotonin come to mind because it’s a game in which you manage acceleration.
For me, Monkey Ball’s essence is dialogue through course design. As a kid it was fun to, for example, discover the course where the invisible path spelled “invisible” and map it on graph paper. Or to figure out that you could avoid the obstacles in a given course by going full tilt at just the right time — sometimes that time was the starting line. I felt clever for giving it as good as the game was dishing it out. I certainly got dopamine out of it.
But I wonder how I’ll feel revisiting it for the first time since 2006 or so. Super Monkey Ball 2 was the only game we had for our GameCube. I also have basically no beef with any of Super Mario Sunshine’s alleged crimes for the same reason. Maybe my expectations of reward structures have changed both in 20 years and the past 18 months.
Peggle is a fun but heart-on-sleeve crass exercise in juicing dopamine. What would a “serotonergic” video game be like? Is that what the wholesome games are getting at? My best guess is Tetris Effect but that’s a ball of string to untangle.
