My brother was here for Christmas, and last night he bought a platinum GCN and Super Monkey Ball 2. We've been doing nothing but playing Super Monkey Ball since he's been here (I haven't even been able to play Metroid Prime). As he was leaving, he gave part 2 to me. I let him borrow SMB1, but I'll probably just buy a new copy and let him keep it (he did buy both games for me).

My first impression of Super Monkey Ball 2 is that it's not nearly as good as the original. The concept of Super Monkey Ball is a simple one, and they just took it too far, trying to come up with extreme challenges without putting in the creative care that they seemed to with part 1.

So far there's a lot of stages in the main game that have inexact places, spots that rely partly on luck that you don't have a 100% chance of passing. This of course kills your chances of playing a perfect game. They also complicated things with VCR buttons in some stages (play, pause, fast forward..) and there's a lot of similarity from stage to stage.

The added story mode is something I thought would be cool, even fantasized about, but the dialogue is incredibly bad. The villian has no personality, and 3 of the monkeys may as well be the same person. At least when Baby speaks, it's funny, though.

It's fun to me, I'm all for more SMB stages, but I couldn't recommend to someone who hasn't played the original to start out with this one.

This game may make up for it in mini-games. Part 2 has 12 of them compared to SMB's 6. I tried two so far, Monkey Golf 2 and Monkey Target 2. The original Monkey Golf was like an awesome goofy golf simulator, but this new one tries to mimic real golf. You may as well be playing any of the 1200 other golf games. Target 2 (think hangglider from Pilotwings) seems to think it's cool because it has bonuses covering every metric inch of airspace, and astronomical points on the landing pads. I like the original better in this case too.