Why wasn't this fun?
GAME PLAY
Difficult. Mind numbingly difficult. Touch screen controls or analog controls don't make a difference. Touch screen you have to be way to exact, analog are way to inaccurate. Basically, its marble madness in 3D. You control a ball to the goal. You collect bananas for extra lives, and for high scores.
I can beat most of the levels, but I get to a certain point where the game is impossible for me regardless of what I try. This detracts a big portion of the score. It isn't like good challenging like Master Quest, its bad challenging like... bad challenging.
There are multiplayer mini games, but they require multiple carts and stuff. The ones I did play were stripped down versions of the ones in the console games. Basically, nothing is as good as in the console counterparts.
GRAPHICS
The game looks great on the DS. If the game had the nice backdrops from the GC games it would look identical to the console games beside the ugly monkey.
SOUND
Not very good. What is there is repetitive, and annoying. The start up music made me want to turn off the DS. I played some levels with sound, and most of it is generic like the console games, but it does fit. Outside of the annoying stuff, the sound is decent.
VALUE
I could say the game had really good value. If you like to do stuff that will make you throw your DS, it does have good value. If you have plenty of money to spend on multiple carts it has good value. Basically, it doesn't have good value. Its just not fun enough.
TILT
For a game like this, with no story, I still rate TILT on the games grab. Without a story, what keeps you coming back in a game. Sometimes you don't know. This game had the grab to a certain point, then it threw it away with near impossible levels that made you want to quit.
OVERALL
I did enjoy this game for the first 2 hours, but everything after that was frustration and disappointment. If you are godly at monkey ball games, then you may still enjoy it, but if your just above average or anything worse than that, stay away. It has everything required to be fun, but just isn't.