Monkey Madness
November 13, 2011 4 Comments
Who doesn’t love monkeys? Well besides creationists or Charlton Heston? Kids love them because they’re funny. Adults love them because they amuse children. PETA loves them because they’re a bunch of furries. Scientists love them because hobos put up too much of a fight. But I don’t love monkeys. I hate them. Damn dirty apes the whole lot of them. They fling poo. They make shitty movies with Clint Eastwood and Ronald Reagan. And they star in crappy video games, like Monkey Madness.
It’s an arcade platformer where you play as the world’s least limber primate who attempts to make his way to the top of the screen. On the default difficulty, “easy”, the game is fucking impossible to play. The monkey moves like he’s been sprayed down with liquid nitrogen and thrown into a vat of tapioca pudding. Such an act is completely immoral. Well, unless you’re wearing a WPRC lab coat and you have the most wacky hypothesis any egghead has ever had, but I digress.
In order to complete a stage, you have to get to the top of the screen. The screen is divided into seven sections, each a horizontal line that occasionally has a gap start sliding across it. Jump through the gap, reach the next floor. The problem is the gaps appear completely by random. There’s no patterns so you can’t form a strategy. If you fall back to the original floor, you lose a life. This includes jumping up to the second platform and immediately falling through a gap that appears at random. If you jump up and hit the wall above you, the monkey is knocked out for an insufferable amount of time, and if you fall through a gap that appears under you, the clock starts over. You can make it to the next-to-last floor, get knocked out by a bad jump or an enemy, and fall all the way to the bottom, completely by chance.
On easy mode, the play control is incredibly stiff and unresponsive. That’s because the difficulty modes aren’t so much about difficulty, but speed. At Indie Gamer Chick, I play everything primarily on whatever the default difficulty level is. So when I played Monkey Madness on the default easy difficulty, after thirty minutes I had no problem declaring it the worst video game I had every played in my entire life.
However, I always at least screw around a little bit on other difficulties when I play games for this site. Not wanting to waste too much more time with this pile of shit, I skipped straight to hard. That’s when I discovered that the difficulties actually control the speed of the game, not specifically the difficulty. So hard mode is actually like playing the game on an acceptable level of speed. “Well I’ll be a monkey’s aunt, the game is almost playable like this!” I thought. Oh, it’s still horrible. The collision detection and even the platform detection is way off. But it WAS playable on hard. So welcome to Opposite Land, where hard is easy. In that spirit, I do declare that Monkey Madness is the best game ever!
Monkey Madness was developed by Phoebit
80 Microsoft Points are likely to be quoted out of context in the making of this review.
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Gameplay footage courtesy of http://Indies.onPause.org
Indie Gamer Chick 
What the heck? That monkey doesn’t fall through the floor. Common gaming conventions should suggest that stuff that doesn’t have platforms below it should FALL.
In other words Kairi, you’re doing it wrong. 😀
Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. Ah, inconsistency. My favourite quality.
After reading the review, I was going to try playing it out of morbid curiosity. I enjoy seeing how bad games/films/whatever can be. But…after seeing the video, I don’t want to. It looks genuinely unplayable. Yuck.
Ok, you know what? It’s hardly fun, but not as awful as I expected. It’s bad, but not THAT bad.
There are some bad design decisions (the stupidly long dizzy period after your monkey hits its head, the randomly assigned gaps that caused me, within the space of a minute, to fall all the way from the top to the bottom and to be trapped at the bottom for fully 25 seconds) but it became much easier to play once started grabbing power ups and realised that they monkey, like enemies, can loop from one side of the screen to other, Pac Man style.
Again, bad but not THAT bad. Old School Destruction, which I played today, is much worse.
(excuse the missing words. It’s late. Well, 11am, but still…)