Super Monkey Ball: Step & Roll (Nintendo Wii)

In Super Monkey Ball: Step & Roll AiAi and the monkey friends of his (MeeMee, GonGon, Baby, and, for the first time, Jam) once more find themselves enclosed in balls, and once more have to be driven to the exit point of each of many courses. The in-ball characters are made roll to the goal by inclining the stage in any direction by less or more degrees. New from the preceding instalments of the series is the possibility to use the Wii Balance Board to perform in-game jumps, while the inclination of the playfield is still given moving the Wii Remote however; it is possible to make no use of the balance board at all. More or fewer obstacles are scattered through the courses depending upon the control method chosen, since using the balance board makes it more demanding to play per se.

The single-player mode consists of levels bracketed in the number of ten in a quantity of themed worlds; each world is regarded as unrelated with the others, and, since that, the completion of it will lead to the game’s credits (that are not capable of being skipped). Levels can be played in co-operative mode: one will use the Wii Remote, one the balance board. More obstacles are placed into levels if two players co-operate. Multi-player mode can be joined by up to four players and makes use of split-screen view to display the action. Marathon mode demands to live without dying even once through the first half of game’s levels, the second half of them, or all of them one after the other. There are minigames designed for one, two, and up to four players (to play each with a Wii Remore, or a player using the Wii Balance Board and the others up to three Wii Remote) to battle against each other.

Indicators shown (not optionally) on screen during the game play are: the speed meter on the bottom left, the number of lives and bananas gathered (an extra life is awarded for each 20 bananas gathered, unlike for 100 as in the series’ origins) and the current score on the top right, the timer on the top left (1 minute is the time given to complete a stage). Stages are named and not merely numbered. The fifth level in each world is a bonus stage with fifty bananas to take. The score on levels’ end results from Time Score (a hundred points per each second left) added to Stage Score (a hundred multiplied by the stage number points) and Clear Score (equal to Stage Score diminished by a hundred points and a hundred points for each bonus stage played in that world world), thus valuing swiftness.