GAME
$50
Sega goes bananas!
What's the object of Sega's first (and highly anticipated) GameCube title of the season? Rolling a ball with a monkey inside and collecting bananas. Really.
What makes Super Monkey Ball brilliant is its high tech way of creating low tech appeal. The player maneuvers a translucent sphere - rather like a plastic hamster exercise ball - over airborne ramps and platforms. You don't actually control the ball - you move the world beneath it, tilting and tossing the horizon, like in the old school toy Labyrinth. Frantic tilts (and panicked countertilts) send the ball and its simian rider careening wildly through switchbacks, over steep ramps, around high-bank turns, and into other surreal arenas suspended over dizzying virtual heights.
The effect of the elegantly straightforward physics - a speed rush. I started off cautiously, tentatively tipping the landscape, but soon enough I was flinging the ball into arcing turns and daredevil jumps in order to shave a few seconds off my time.
The 90-plus levels of ramp mayhem (modeled on the original arcade game) are just the beginning. Super Monkey Ball can handle up to four players and is well-stocked with monkey game derivations. Among them: Monkey Billiards, which challenges players to a game of nine-ball and is an impressive pool simulator (if you can ignore the screeching of nine sphere-bound monkeys sent to the rails when the rack is broken), Monkey Bowling, and Monkey Golf. You'll go ape for this.
Sega: www.sega.com.
STREET CRED
Clip.FM
Hitachi 43FDX11B vs. Sony FD Trinitron Wega KV-36HS20
Shrinking the Cat: Genetic Engineering Before We Knew About Genes, by Sue Hubbell
GoBook Max
Super Monkey Ball
Delgo, a Hero's Journey
Flash Advance Linker and Card
ReadMe
Music
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Screenblast
Artifacts: An Archaeologist's Year in Silicon Valley, by Christine Finn
Just Outta Beta
Kodak EasyShare DX3900
TrafficSchool.com
Contributors
