No flies on this monkey in the graphics department. Super Monkey Ball Adventure for PSP is chock full of variety and good looks. Things sometimes are too micro to really be appreciated, but the detail in each level is nice. The free roaming Story Mode so wants to be Mario, Spyro or some other similar game. The "aping" attempt comes off as a paler imitation, especially because the mechanics of play are weaker here. The sound and music are good, but lack enough variety. Other touches that make for strained presentation include some loading between levels and no way to skip NPC dialogue. The story levels are stimulating and frustrating at the same time for breaking with some basic convention.

The addition of mini-games and party games adds to the game, and the graphics in these segments are quite a bit different than the story or puzzle sections. The core puzzles have much the same presentation as in the original Super Monkey Ball. My overall appreciation for cute and colorful aspects of Super Monkey Ball Adventure was lost in a general disappointment with the gameplay.

Super Monkey Ball purists who are concerned about having to play through an "adventure" to reach the puzzles can rest easy, since there is a straight challenge mode with all the arcade puzzle action a person could stand. Think of it as the traditional game plus some serious extras. The puzzle levels work as you would expect and the adventure levels contain puzzles scattered throughout several worlds. Trying to translate the timed puzzle format to a more open-ended world seems to be hit or miss for these monkeys.

In Story Mode, you choose one of four default monkeys and start rolling around the first world. There are some banana pickups scattered throughout the world that require various levels of skill to obtain. There isn't one exclusive objective or storyline to knit the game together. Super Monkey Ball Adventure suffers from kitchensinkitis - that all too common malady afflicting games where the dizzying range of options leaves the player a little confused. Stay confused long enough and you may lose interest. I found the diagrams in the manual that show where each quest is located on each island annoying; a well-designed adventure game gives you the sense of freedom while subtly tracking you along... the control you never know is there is the best kind. Quests are also not all available at once and seemed to require some sequence of events rather than being weighted according to difficulty. In the first two or three quests, I went from a simple treasure hunt to very difficult timed platforming. The sad part about players losing interest is that there is clearly a whole lot of game built into Super Monkey Ball Adventure. Five worlds to explore, lots of NPCs and quests...

As a sidebar to the adventure style of play, there are seven "Party" games and a "Challenge" mode that lets you just play the puzzles. As in the first Monkey Ball game, puzzles increase in difficulty and gradually introduce new elements of gameplay. Somehow the physics and control scheme for the puzzles felt better than in Story Mode. Whether this is by design or application I can't say. The party games are often not anything to do with the traditional "rolling ball" play. Racing around a track, using two halves of the ball to hang-glide, and punching opponents off a floating platform... all for playing with up to three human or CPU opponents. If you like the Monkey Ball challenges and puzzles and have some friends you know will play with you, there's enough meat on the bone in these two modes to make up for the relatively weak Story Mode. As mentioned in the section above, visual scale is sometimes reduced to the point that it's hard to see what you are doing with your monkey, but not enough to ruin the fun. The only bad news about these two modes is that some special items, characters and tracks are only available for purchase by playing Story Mode. This is a neat idea and would have been a great selling point if Story Mode was more fun to play.

Control in almost every mode of Super Monkey Ball Adventure is sluggish. This makes for a steeper learning curve in the puzzles and party games, but really saps the Story Mode. Cheap deaths abound in Story Mode and often in the puzzles. The camera is not bad and adjusts when it needs to go from down low to up high. The physics for rolling and controlling the ball are decent, but the damn thing feels like it's made of lead. You would think that a clear ball with magical powers containing a small monkey would move at a brisk pace, wouldn't you? The edge detection in Story Mode is completely moronic. Jumping on springboard platforms of any kind involves fervent prayer and a hand steadier than an ER surgeon's. The slightest twitch will send the ball over its target, and hitting any surface to the side of a springboard will send the ball tumbling down or deflect it off into space. There are a lot of these bouncing platforms in the game because the monkey in a ball can't jump. So rolling onto a platform that sends you skyward is necessary to take the monkey to new heights without a ramp. There are plenty of ramps and jumps that work fine, but every attempt to navigate when airborne was depressing. It's not that it can't be done, but that it is way too difficult compared to other aspects of the game.

One blessing here is the simplicity of control. The analog stick rolls the ball and the shoulder buttons move the camera. Other buttons activate menus or special features during Party Game mode. Establishing a multiplayer game is easy. An option displayed early into the selection of a Party Game allows you to search for other players. Joining a game and establishing options for play is gotten out of the way quickly. There are too many loading screens during the Party Game rounds, though. If a game is five rounds, there are five rounds of loading screen to sit through, which began to drag on my nerves. Controls in the Party Game segments are different than anything in Story or Puzzle, but are still simple to remember and execute. Rarely is there much to concern oneself with other than the analog stick and maybe one more button.

Mishmashed and overloaded, this monkey game should have picked a strength and played to it. There could have been a tweaked adventure game built on puzzle levels and objectives for completion of puzzles. Even if the party game mechanics had played more of a role in Story Mode, Super Monkey Ball Adventure would have been a superior title. Instead, the whole endeavor falls a bit flat and fails to make much of an impression other than moments of fun punctuated too often by frustration. In the next go-round, we hope to see a return to the puzzle roots of this bad monkey.