The premise for the game is, of course, a little absurd. You’re one of four monkeys, all in balls, all with ears that look a lot like cinnamon buns. Aiai, an average looking monkey, is the leader of the group. Trouble starts when Dr. Bad-boon, a evil, jealous monkey scientist, steals all the bananas from your island. Plus he’s hitting on your girl, a totally repulsed female monkey named Meemee. What’s a monkey to do? Obviously save the day by completing a series of puzzles which involve rolling your ball past certain obstacles in order to cross a pre-determined finish line somewhere on the course. Obviously! These stages are presented in sets of twenty of varying difficulty level, but you’ll only need to complete ten to watch the next cut-scene and move on to the next set. As the storyline (pulled from Super Monkey Ball 2) progresses, and Dr. Bad-boon thinks of new ways to escape and torture you, you’ll be rolling through areas with themes like, “Inside a Whale” and “In the Boiling Pot.” You can even see giant carrots cooking in the background. Yes, things get pretty crazy.

The storyline as described above really only applies to the one player mode. Here Sega has included 114 areas from the original Super Monkey Ball, 140 from Super Monkey Ball 2, and a 46 new, "Deluxe-exclusive" stages. These courses, ranked in difficulty from one to ten bananas, range from pleasantly simple to hair-pullingly hard. The most frustrating ones require both a good deal of patience and a whole lot of precision. Luckily, as stated before, you only need to complete half of the stages in a set to move on in the game, but even that becomes pretty difficult at a point. In fact, my biggest qualm with Super Monkey Ball Deluxe is that those really hard stages just aren’t fun. Certain people, I’m sure, enjoy the challenge of having to replay an area ten or twenty times in a row just to see your monkey dance with victory when you complete it. Personally, I like the simpler levels; there’s no stress involved and I can breathe easy enough to enjoy rolling around. I might even have the free time to pick up some bananas, which have been strategically placed around the stages for extra points. With all that in mind, I have to admit, it is really satisfying to finally get that one impossible stage you’ve been working at forever.

Whatever problems there are in the one player mode, the party games more than make up for them. Super Monkey Ball Deluxe has twelve different party games, all of which are notably complex and offer a variety of user options. Some, of course, are better than others. Monkey Race DX, Monkey Fight DX and Monkey Billiards DX rank among the best; all three are highly entertaining, competition-inspiring and have intuitive and unobtrusive controls. Monkey Bowling and Monkey Boat, at the other end of the spectrum, handle awkwardly and will probably be abandoned for other, more fun choices. Still, in the overall, Sega has brought together a very strong selection of games, some of which are wonderful enough that they’re worth the thirty dollars on their own. They let this title shine for what it really is: an amazing party game. If only there was online play. Oh well. Still, there’s just something great about being a monkey in a ball beating up other monkeys in balls with a giant metal boxing glove.

It’s hard to make a judgement call on the graphics for Super Monkey Ball Deluxe. If you’re looking for Resident Evil 4 style perfection and attention to detail, this probably isn’t the title for you. But if you’re appreciative of, let’s say, Katamari Damacy type simplicity, then it might be. To put it simply: the graphics do what they need to do. They match well with the straightforward, upbeat tone of the game itself. They’re not setting any new records, but they’re also not in the way. And at times they’re even adorable. The game’s soundtrack is pretty simplistic too, though here it seems the title could have benefitted from some more diversity. True, the few tunes we do hear are catchy and fun, but after playing a certain area long enough they become repetitive. What seemed fun at first can get old, if not fast, than at least after a while. A few variations for different stages really wouldn’t have hurt. Even the sound issues, in the end, aren’t that big a deal (if you can ever get the stage menu song and the sound of opening balls out of your mind). The thing that seems downright impractical though is the way the camera operates in the one player mode. Turn a certain way to angle yourself for a perfect role, and you’ll find you can only see in a totally useless direction - a big problem in a game based on precision. True, when stuck, you can move a tiny replica of the stage map around, but that’s usually not much help, especially since the analog stick dedicated to the ability seems much better fitted to simply positioning the camera.

In the overall, this game is definitely worth an open-minded try. Sure, it has its flaws, but it’s also a lot of fun, especially with more than one player. There’s a reason Super Monkey Ball was so popular for the Cube, and now that Sega has opened up the party to Xbox and PS2 users, you should really consider going out, buying this title and joining in on the ball-rolling excitement.