Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania - Switch | Xbox | PS4 | PS5 - REVIEW 

I think I have yet another reason to get a GameCube. Thank you for your service, good sir!

Rank the controllers for SMB Banana Mania.

@@moonbilal707 1 - PS5, 2 - PS4, 3 - Xbox Series X, 4 - Gamecube on Switch, 5 - Pro Controller on Switch, 6 - Joycon on Switch. In the end though there isn't a ton of difference.

@@GameSack I gotta ask, what about the gyro controls?

@@KingRey. You can enable them, but I never did. Nor would I. Couldn't stand that on the Wii.

It makes sense, since the Gamecube is square shaped, WOOOOOO!!

Sounds like some weird lost knowledge to me, or maybe it was something they didn't intend originally or something like that. The GC version having a square deadzone might have been because of the nature of the octagonal gate or something, but since newer controllers don't have the notches and are just completely circle they overlooked it or didn't feel like they had to include it.

Thanks for this comment. A lot of people, myself included, would've never known about this and would've ended up with the inferior version of the game. Looking forward to trying Monkey Ball for the first time.

But in that case why did the GC controller not do any difference to him?

@@oscarzxn4067 Maybe only the Steam version has support for the square deadzone on a software level.

Agreed. The Gamecube was underrated even in its time, I feel.

@@GameSack putted a lot of effort on making the game more innovative and funnier, this still holds nowadays . No felling of copycat games on the gamecube

@@GameSack the hype of ps2 was too strong. It’s a beloved console, I can’t take that away. But even after the ps2 was over with their were people who bought so deeply into the hype that they still thought it was more powerful than GameCube or Xbox “if developers ever learned to harness its power”.

@@Gatorade69 I played recently the gamecube on a HD TV . The antialiasing still holds today the graphics is clean and Colorful + the uge effort into artworks, nowadays is putted into cinematic .

@@GameSack Nobody took it seriously. We weren't sold on it until a friend brought one over. We had so much fun with it, everyone ended up buying one. It was great.

in my experience thus far the new control setup in banana mania (at least on the xbox) offers WAY more precise movement and abilities than the gamecube ever could. the fundamental difference is that it's just a dual-stick game now - the game really is designed to expect you to tweak the angle you're pushing from periodically with the right stick, but for me this really didn't take very long to get used to - the initial learning curve is about the same as the original games were - and the whole game actually feels better than the originals and the new control scheme allows for a lot of precise movements that just weren't possible in the originals. 🤷‍♂️ i have no complaints.

i'm gonna agree to disagree. i've been playing the xbox version of banana mania for a while now, having played the original gamecube games to death and back back in the day, and for me these new controls have ruined absolutely nothing and i have no idea how joe had so much difficulty with them. the camera stick allows for much more precise fine-tuning of movement that just wasn't possible on the gamecube - the new controls took me a very brief bit to get used to but now it's 2nd nature and a substantial improvement over the original game. 🤷‍♂️

@@ActuallySanFrancisco Hm, guess it is subjective. Will have to try it for myself & see I suppose. Are you a high level player tho or just a casual one? There is a big difference.

​@@skins4thewin i was pretty high level with the originals back in the day, though i'm not as well practiced as i used to be. i will freely admit that the new controls do have a learning curve, but it's a very reasonable one. the most fundamental difference is that banana mania really does basically require you to use the right stick in addition to the left one in certain scenarios - it's a dual stick game now - and i feel like joe just didn't want to adapt to that, but if you do, it becomes very clear very quickly that you can now make precise and fast movement adjustments and even death-saves that were straight up impossible with the gamecube's single-stick configuration, and you can still get into that same zen-like flow state the original game produced so perfectly. it feels to me like sega made a real effort to improve the game while keeping seasoned veterans in mind, as the overall fluidity, intuitiveness, and learning curve of the new controls is every bit as good as the original controls were - it's just a different approach that allows for more nuanced movement, since the game now expects you to control the ball and sometimes tweak the camera / angle you're pushing from simultaneously, much like virtually every other modern 3d game. overall it opens the game up substantially in terms of the sort of moves you can pull off. it feels fresh and i like it just fine. people are just going to have to approach it like they did when first playing the originals and give themselves time to learn all the new nuances.

Probably played Monkey Target more than the main game personally.

And if YOU don't like well he doesn't care! Whooooaaaaaa so impressive

@@mattjindrak Sadly, that is impressive considering how judgmental people are today. Take your reply for instance: You couldn't help but be a smartass because someone made a comment you found to be ridiculous. You really just proved their point.

@@JSchaffer214 completely agree with you

Correct.

Haven't had any major problems with Actraiser Renaissance here. But this looks to be a bit messy.

I mean we have the original director and a team of Jet Set Radio fans working on Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. The only thing missing is the contributing songs from Shibuya-kei artists and Beastie Boys

Hey hey, it’s the Matrix master himself, Bones Jackson! Good seeing you’re also a fine consumer of RU-vid videos!

But sonic mania was made by a studio that actually cares about sonic

It’s when Amusement Vision stopped making the games.

i've been playing banana mania all afternoon - and i played the original gamecube titles to death - and i honestly have no idea what joe's problem is. the new controls, to me, feel like a massive improvement, not a detriment. the right stick camera control allows for much more precision movement that wasn't possible on the gamecube at all, and took roughly 10 minutes of playtime before it just started feeling like 2nd nature. i'm able to perform nuanced moves much faster and easier than i could on the gamecube, and it's 100% because the controls in this version offer for more precision, not less. i love joe and i'm glad he gave his own honest review, but when he asked "is it me?" yes, it's definitely joe. the new controls aren't giving me any problems whatsoever and feel like a total improvement over the gamecube controls. 🤷‍♂️

I scanned the credits for Nagoshi's name but didn't notice it.

I just looked online and you're right, which makes even more sense to me as to why this version isn't quite as good. I'm guessing he wasn't programming the physics engine but he was the director and producer for the first two games.

Also I was referring to you in the first part. I'm decent at best but I've never even completed the story mode. Sega made challenging games even then, for sure.

Cuphead and Ori were made in Unity :)

@@beardalaxy Cuphead was buttery-smooth the majority of the time, but I saw a few brief bouts of annoying stuttering, only every so often (probably every 15-20 minutes, at most). They knew how to avoid this weird hitching issue seen in Actraiser and Monkey Ball, anyway!

​@Jamie McLaughlin Yeah, Unity really doesn't seem like an especially smooth or well-optimized engine, though it can produce pretty good results in the right hands. That said, it has a reputation as an easy way for newbies to get into game development, which then leads to a disproportionate number of games by less skilled or experienced devs. Which then leads to it looking like a bad engine!

That's what I like about this channel. I think a lot of reviewers tend to give devs too much praise and don't really give enough attention to both the pros *and* cons of a game. I'm also glad that Game Sack doesn't rate stuff based on a number system. Too many people will give a pass/fail to shit they haven't even played based on whether or not the game gets above or below a 7/10.

Oil up and hit the gym with them monkies balls

@@Jbayz they should make a yoga ball with a monkey inside lmao I would throw it around and pretend it's Joe struggling on level 7 😂

work out for me so I can lose weight

Same bro, I love pumping weight with the sack

Ninja Gaiden comes to mind when I hear "8-bit frustration", even though I never owned an NES (I only owned a PS2, PS3, DS and Switch Lite).

@@dinohermann1887 I think Ninja Gaiden's reputation is exaggerated, although the final boss bug that sends you back to the start of world 6 is just BS. It ruins the game for me. That said, the game is no cakewalk. Battletoads is the classic example of insane NES difficulty (with its infamous Turbo Tunnel... and the game just gets harder after that). I'm also rediscovering how brutal Castlevania III can be, though it's still not on the same level as Battletoads.

*WINNER mint

I got a press kit for it but it didn't come with a game.

I'll be honest and say I actually like the Reboot version of the original Cotton...might even prefer it over the original game honestly. It's probably the one instance in which I can actually say that in good faith, but I also didn't have any experience with the series before Reboot besides Marchen Adventure on the SNES/SFC.

I would actually give it props if all the Dole stuff was replaced by Chiquita. That'd be a giant FU to Dole which would make me laugh just because.

Also, Anthropod was obnoxiously difficult so glad that's been made easy.

They really couldn't add that in the Switch version as an exclusive, mixed with the PS2/Xbox content? Ugh...

Frame pacing issues involve rendered frames showing up at uneven times, though. Unity appears to be rendering every frame at the right time, but some objects (e.g., the camera) stop moving on certain frames. It's more like how NES games like Ninja Gaiden could look a bit choppy- it was because the characters would only move, say, 50 times a second, even when the game was running at 60fps.

That would've been awesome. Or at least collect CDs instead of bananas.