‘Twas Brillig*

I’m finally past Ice Lolly Land - the final stage fluctuation was a problem and then today second attempt I just did it; monkey ball is often like that, a stage appears impassable and suddenly everything clicks.
I’ve now unlocked four more lands Tempest Storm, Meteorite Mayhem, Big Bang Boom and Zero G Station - that makes ten lands in total so this may be near the end, but the last two lands are on a new map screen leaving plenty of room for more. We’ll just have to wait and see, Ice Lolly Land took so much time I’m not convinced I’ll end up finishing four more lands (too many other things).

I’m stuck on Ice Lolly Land, unfortunately I’ve encountered an old friend from the original gamecube version - ‘Acute’ - and so far I’ve only finished the stage once.

I finally completed all the courses on Palarver Lava - as seems to be usual at first one or two seemed to rely on pure luck, but now I know better.

I’ve finally completed Fantascene Falls and suddenly whirl doesn’t seem that difficult.

At lunchtime I had a couple of attempts at Fantascene Falls and failed on Whirl (stage 10 [of 10!]) - in sight of the end no less. Pah!

At lunchtime I completed Junglistic Journey, some of the stages are quite hard - Pincer (stage 4) requires slow measured movement and Starfish (stage 6) is 9 parts luck to 1 part skill.

This evening I’ve completed the Blistering Sands stages - only one tricky stage Betting Course (stage 7), but now I’ve done it even that stage is easy.

I’ve now unlocked three more sets Fantascene Falls, Palarvar Lava and Ice Lolly Land.

I’ve completed the Wet ‘N’ Windy stages. Assimilate (stage 9) took a while, but otherwise all was good. No boss (thankfully!) and a diverting end of set game (toss monkeys in the air to convert letters in the credits into bananas), but no high score table. I can’t believe it would have required much effort to have coded a high score table - lazy.

I have now unlocked two more sets of stages Junglistic Journey and Blistering Sands.

Yesterday I went into Game and they had banana blitz (for the wii) and touch ‘n’ roll (for the DS) going cheap so I had to have them. Controlling banana blitz is fairly straightforward since a motion sensing remote is kind of an obvious fit to a game where you have to tilt the world. Controlling the DS version is harder (but not impossible).

I’ve completed a couple of worlds in Banana Blitz - the end of world bosses are an annoying addition to the franchise. We also had some multiplayer fun, but it looks like I’m going to have to get some more remotes sometime soon.