Video game franchises have been crossing over from one genre to the next for years. Often times a platformer hero will jump behind the wheel of a go-kart or pick up a tennis racket, but sometimes characters move into genres in which they aren’t really expected. Ever seen a puzzle game spawn a platformer adventure spin-off? Consider Super Monkey Ball Adventure from Sega and Traveller’s Tails, a title which attempt to take puzzle game heroes Aiai, MeeMee, GonGon, and Baby and give them a whole world and storyline in which to play.

Features

• Join the heroes of Super Monkey Ball in a new 3D adventure title
  Journey across the islands Monearth to restore happiness
  
• Use Monkey Chants to gain new powers
  
• Includes new puzzles reminiscent of the original Monkey Ball experience
  
• Party games offer multiplayer options
  

A Timeless Tale of Forbidden Love
The story of Super Monkey Ball Adventure (told in flashback, incidentally) involves the forbidden love of a prince and a princess from neighboring kingdoms. Without happiness throughout the land, the proposed marriage can never be. Enter AiAi and the other monkeys of Monkey Ball fame who must travel around the islands of Monearth to perform little odd jobs and tasks for the monkey inhabitants. Accomplishing these tasks raises the total happiness level of the world.

For instance, early in the game a monkey sitting on a top hat has lost her little monkey baby. The player is tasked with finding the lost monkling, but the catch is that the baby likes to hide in top hats, and - what a coincidence! - there just happen to be five other monkeys nearby who are all wearing top hats. It's up to AiAi (or whichever of the monkeys the player chooses at the start of the game) to roll around the area, find these monkeys, and roll into them in order to knock the hats off of their heads. The lost baby is in one of the hats, and knocking off the correct hat will reveal the child and bring happiness to the fretting mother. The catch, however, is that hat-wearing monkeys do not like to be bumped by other monkeys inside of small transparent balls. The behatted monkeys will step out of the way of an impending rolling, causing players to have to aim carefully and make last-minute course adjustments. Beyond that, rolling into a hat-wearing monkey at full speed just flattens the monkey into a pancake, hat and all. Eventually the flattened simian will right itself, leaving it open for another collision (but just not so fast this time).

This sort of thing goes on for a long, long time. It seems that every monkey on Monearth has a task for AiAi. One monkey wants help killing creepy weeds, while another needs someone to deliver lunch to her husband, and so on. The idea is that for each mission that is completed, the happiness index of the world increases just a little. As the game progresses the missions increase in difficulty, of course, and eventually the assignments don't come off as trivial little tutorial errands. Before too long AiAi will be asked to find the missing prince and princess, and from there the plot (such as it is) starts to take off.



Unfortunately, the world of a large open 3D adventure game just doesn’t mesh well with rolling a monkey across narrow bridges, up steep hills, or around sharp cliffs. The monkey ball has some weight to it. It has inertia and momentum. It’s just not possible to make a sudden stop or turn the way one might expect Super Mario to do so when he’s running a full speed. That should be expected here; otherwise Super Monkey Ball Adventure would be just another adventure game. The problem is that AiAi and friends are rolling around a world not designed for their unique movement abilities. Monearth is packed with poorly designed places that are either monkey death traps or tedious obstacles. Moving the monkey ball around would be enjoyable if the world were designed with the ball’s strengths and limitations in mind. Instead players are dropped into a world that could easily have come from most any generic 3D adventure game from this generation of gaming. This is the core failure of Super Monkey Ball Adventure, and chances are if this poor design were corrected, the game’s other flaws may not seem as glaring.