Splicing Speedruns in Super Monkey Ball

I don’t know if any game series has a higher ratio of difficulty to simplicity as the Monkey Ball titles. Just use the analog joystick to tilt a 3D landscape to use physics and gravity to steer a plastic ball containing a money into a goal tape. But within that simple premise is some of the most devilishly hard gaming of all. Especially in the original game, Super Monkey Ball. (Okay, the original original was Monkey Ball, but that was only released in Japanese arcades, and is pretty similar to the arcade mode of Super anyway.) To truly beat S.M.B. you have to complete 50 stages of Expert, then the secret 10 stages of Expert Extra which only appear if you finish Expert without using a continue. This means doing it in three lives, plus whatever additionals you can scratch together by collecting 100 bananas, while completing levels like this: It isn’t the focus of this post, but here’s a run through all of SMB1’s Expert, Expert Extra and Master stages. The thing about Super Monkey Ball…