For the last month me and my brother have been playing a lot of the original Super Monkey Ball, especifically the monkey target mode, and I think it’s the best multiplayer-party-game-mode-thing that I have ever played while being extremely chill.
You take turns to roll your monkey down a Ski Jumping style ramp to then open your monkey-ball midair and use the opened ball as wings and try to land on differently shaped targets. While flying you can grab floating bananas to fill a gradius style power up bar, and that’s what makes the game extremely interesting. There’s a lot of cool decision making in trying to decide where, when and what power up to use. All of this while having a very chill sega vibe.
Some of the sequels also have this mode, I have only tried it on Super Monkey Ball 2 but it is not nearly as good as the Money Target on the first one, the most recent Monkey Ball game (Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD) also has this minigame but it looks like they sucked all the life and soul out of the original one.
After trying all of the minigames/party games on the first two mokey ball games, Yakuza’s minigames being so excellent makes a lot of sense, because Toshihiro Nagoshi is also the director of the Monkey Ball series. Most of the other party/minigames are also pretty good but not nearly as good as monkey target.
We are getting ridiculously good and we are currently competing to see who figures out/has the skill to max-out the score.
I have been thinking a lot about multiplayer/party games recently because my brother has been hosting covid-safe gatherings with 3 of his friends, in which he takes a projector and a projector screen to the backyard and they play games and watch mvies on there, outdoors, all wearing masks and safely distanced. They have been playing a lot of multiplayer/party steam games since they were on middle school and they were getting tired of some of them, so my brother asked if I knew some ps2/gamecube era multiplayer games that they could easily emulate and play. But what actually inspired me to make this thread is that yesterday they were playing Videoball and one of them said something like “man, this is to stressful, let’s play something more chill”, my brother inmediatly knew what to do, and he launched super monkey ball on dolphin.
So with some if not most people here already getting vaccinated, I thought it would be nice to have some chill multiplayer game recomendations because irl hang outs are becoming a reality again.