Kororinpa: Marble Mania [import] review

Kororinpa makes us feel guilty. Sort of. It's not that it's usurped Monkey Ball's place in our hearts, exactly, it's just that... well... now we've seen so much more of it, we kind of want Monkey Ball to pack a bag full of its tired, tedious minigames and get its embarrassing soundtrack and limited flexibility out of our goddamn lives forever. It's time for Kororinpa to move in - glorious Kororinpa with its 100% responsive meaty 3D, its sanity-defying corner leaps and turns and its entire lack of banana-obsessed morons.

It’s not that Kororinpa' s the most beautiful game we've ever seen - it's not. You can't accuse us of just being shallow or anything. What the screen shots don't tell you is how intimately successful your remote interaction with the board is; how every tiny tremor of your tensing fingers makes the game board twitch and turn around the marble, flicking you round ludicrously tight corners and flipping the board a full 360 degrees so you can get around and behind it for shortcuts and bonuses. Not to mention doing things like rolling up stairs (by the power of twist), jumping through gaps to fall perfectly on to hidden levels, dodging obstacles and basically doing more things with a remote and a marble than stupid, predictable old Monkey Ball even realizes is possible.