What can be said about Sega‘s fabulous Super Monkey Ball that hasn’t already been said before? It is a riot of colour and sound that has been bringing joy to games-players for over two decades now. The GameCube version was developed by Amusement Vision (an internal Sega dev team) and first came out in 2001. And it was a smash hit!

The basic idea behind Super Monkey Ball is to guide a rolling ball through a course, in order to reach the exit. While that might sound easy on paper, the courses themselves can be oddly-shaped, have big holes in them, and have constantly-moving parts – and gravity, mass and acceleration have their say too – so these courses can be somewhat challenging to negotiate…

In regular play mode you must complete a series of courses at Beginner, Advanced, and Expert difficulties, consisting of 10, 30, and 50 floors respectively (plus ‘Extra’ floors*).

*=Extra floors only become available if you complete Beginner, Advanced, and Expert challenges, without losing a life.

You are time-penalised if you fall off the course, and if you run out of time you will fail the run.

Completing a course unlocks new goodies, and also rewards you with “Play Points”. Play Points are given for playing the game, or by completing certain achievements, and they can be used for unlocking new minigames.

While the single-player challenge courses are the backbone of Super Monkey Ball, the game is also famous for its minigames, and they’re broken down into two categories: “Party Games”, which are playable from the outset, and “Mini-Games”, which are not.

The Party Games include: Monkey Race (a racing game), Monkey Fight (a boxing/stage-knockout game), and Monkey Target (a flying/target game). And the Mini-Games include: Monkey Billiards, Monkey Bowling, and Monkey Golf.

You need to earn 2500 Playpoints to unlock Monkey Billiards; 5000 Play Points to unlock Monkey Bowling, and 7500 Play points to unlock Monkey Golf. So that’s 15,000 Play points in total.

There’s also a split-screen display in Competition Mode, and lots of stats to peruse once you’ve soaked the game in. The controls are perfect, and the game is super-challenging. Both single and multiplayer games are brilliant fun. Super Monkey Ball and Super Monkey Ball 2 are the ultimate party games, in my humble opinion.

More: Super Monkey Ball on Wikipedia