Super Monkey Ball & Wing Island
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Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz
When I reviewed Super Monkey Ball: Touch & Roll back in February, I stated that there wasn’t a better platform for an SMB game than the Nintendo DS – but that’s no longer the case. Controlling your monkey with a touch screen was great, but the Wii Remote is even better.
If you’ve ever played an SMB game, you’ll know that you’re charged with the task of getting your monkey in a ball from one side of a map to the other by tilting the floor. It therefore doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the Wii Remote is perfectly suited to this, and it really makes Super Monkey Ball feel like the old ball bearing maze games that the genre is based on.
The first time that you get your monkey to the end of a difficult map using the Wii controller, you’ll find yourself sweating with concentration, while the muscles in your arms ache. In fact after playing Banana Blitz, Super Monkey Ball fans may even forgive Sega for the awful Super Monkey Ball: Adventure.
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Wing Island
One of the surprise hits on the Super NES was a game called Pilot Wings. Unlike most games at the time which revolved around instantly gratifying action, Pilot Wings was like a flight simulator on a console – but more fun.
Like Pilot Wings, Wing Island puts you at the controls of a variety of flying machines, with a variety of missions to complete. The action stakes have moved on a bit since Pilot Wings, so it’s not all about flying through hoops and landing in the right place anymore. Now you can appease your destructive side by dropping bombs on rock formations – the only problem is that by the time you get the hang of it, you’re already running out of time!
There’s even a two player versus mode if you fancy a dog fight with one of your friends, while player two can even use the Nunchuk controller, saving you the cost of a second Wii Remote.
I see Wing Island as being a bit of a slow burner. I doubt that too many people will rush out to buy it with their Wii, but anyone who does buy it will probably find that they spend more hours playing it than they ever imagined they would – just like Pilot Wings.
