Super Monkey Ball Jr.

In 2002, Super Monkey Ball Jr. brought to the Game Boy Advance the principle of the popular arcade and later GameCube series, in which the player doesn't tilt a character but an entire transparent ball with a monkey inside, trying to steer it through a maze full of holes, turns, and platforms above a chasm. For what was then Nintendo's most powerful handheld, it was an unusual feat - the game ran in a genuine 3D environment, which was a rarity on the GBA, since the vast majority of games on the console worked in 2D or only with pre-computed pseudo-three-dimensional tricks.

Given the handheld's processing power, the game had to be simplified compared to the big version - from the base GameCube game, a smaller subset of levels remained, divided into Beginner, Advanced, Expert, and Master difficulties, with many of them being direct ports of well-known levels and the rest made up of new platforming stages designed specifically for the handheld version. Besides the main mode, the game also offered four party minigames - Monkey Fight, Monkey Duel, Monkey Golf, and Monkey Bowling - playable with up to four players via a link cable, which made it ideal social entertainment on the go. The controls were adapted for the d-pad and buttons instead of the analog stick used in the home versions, which slightly slowed and softened the game but didn't fundamentally change its core built on patience and precise timing.

Alongside the Realism team, under the supervision of original studio Amusement Vision, publisher THQ also took part in development - it held the license at the time for a number of Sega-published titles for handhelds outside Japan - while Sega itself backed the game on the market. For many Game Boy Advance owners in 2002, this was one of the few demonstrations that even this handheld could handle a genuinely three-dimensional environment with smooth camera movement, rather than just flat 2D scenes or pre-rendered backgrounds, which most games on the console relied on.

Why play: Super Monkey Ball Jr. will delight players who want to try the classic principle of rolling a ball through a maze on the go too, without needing a home console, and who'll appreciate how well the then-unconventional 3D gameplay fit onto the small GBA screen.