Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD's Weird New Update Does Away With The Ball

Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD for Steam has received a strange new update that lets you ditch your ball for three other shapes. The game, which first released on the Wii back in 2006 before eventually getting a HD remaster on consoles and PC in 2019, will now let you ditch the ball on PC–but you can’t just control the monkey directly.

On the character select screen, you can now alter what plastic shape AiAi is rolling around in (it’s seemingly not possible for the other monkeys). Type in “cube” and you’ll end up in a cube-shaped lump of plastic; the same is true if you type in “triangle” or “star”. This will also affect how you move, it seems, as the physics differ between shapes.

In a follow-up tweet, it’s been clarified that this update is only coming to the Steam version, and that while you can use it on every level, it’s not guaranteed that you can actually beat all of them in these other forms–you might need to turn back into a ball to finish the game.

The Super Monkey Ball series could return if Banana Blitz HD does well. The game earned a 5/10 in our review, in which I wrote that it is “not a good showcase of what made the series work.”