In 2021, Sega released Super Monkey Ball: Banana Mania , a remake of the first two Super Monkey Ball games. I’d picked up the first game back in 2002 on the GameCube’s Australian launch day, taking it home alongside the console and a copy of Star Wars Rogue Squadron II . I picked up Banana Mania excited to both revisit the original and finally play the sequel’s levels.
But as good as Banana Mania was – a generous package, quelled slightly by an imperfect adaptation of the original game’s physics – it was hard to play it without thinking about how much time had passed since the early 2000s. As a teenager, I could afford to spend months, even years, struggling through the Expert difficulty levels of the first game. I could trust in my reflexes.
I was not embarrassed by my own frustration when I failed repeatedly at the same course. Things are different now! As much as I admired Banana Mania , I found that it wasn’t an experience that fit into my life as neatly as the original had – especially since Monkey Target , the all-time great party game, was annoyingly different from the basically perfect GameCube original. Perhaps I’d changed, I thought – but also, in my 30s, had I reached the point where my reflexes were atrophying, even slightly? Is Monkey Ball a young person’s game? It certainly looks like it is.
So it was that I came to Banana Rumble thinking that I’d be writing a review about my own mortality, and what it feels like to see a thing you loved .