It seemed to emerge from a crowd of clones untouched, glancing nonchalantly over its shoulder as if to say, ‘What’s all the fuss about? Who needs a pouchy plumber when you have monkeys?’Īnd not just monkeys, either. It proceeded with the underrated strategy of having a calm camera and intuitive controls. ![]() Preferably one piloted by a character that was either (a) an anthropomorphic animal, preferable with jeans (b) in possession of a rude ‘tude, or (c) something that we still don’t understand (my theory is that it’s some sort of space mouse). After Super Mario 64 – which came out three years prior but felt as if it had arrived, fully formed, from the future – you had to have a platformer. The game arrived on this day in 1999, and it remains, in my mind, the finest example of 3D platforming on the PlayStation. The story goes as follows: a white monkey, named Spectre, puts on a helmet that makes him super intelligent and, for some reason, evil he then provides similar helmets, I don’t know where from, for his entire hairy horde they break out of a local theme park – aptly named ‘Monkey Park’ – and lay siege to the lab of a professor, who happens to have invented a time machine, through which they escape and scatter themselves across history. The second thing that leaps out is, of course, the monkeys. In fact, you almost wonder if they had the name before they had anything else. It’s the sort of name that any game maker or marketer must dream of: a rhyme, a plot set up, an emotional anchor. The first thing to consider, when going back to Ape Escape, is the simple, unabashed genius of its name. It’ll have to be the net, and there’s nothing else for it. ![]() They get you, mentally, to a place of absolute resolve: these monkeys must be stopped. They’re a stroke of genius, these loading screens. ![]() By far its most celebrated improvement, however, is the loading screens here, you see the monkeys lounging, dancing, cavorting. And the fiddly functions of the second analogue stick were scrapped, mapping your gadgets, including said net, more sensibly onto the face buttons. The colours were cleaned up and popped off the screen. Its polygons were waxed and buffed, sanding down some of those broken-glass edges. This week, to celebrate its 20th anniversary, I have been playing Ape Escape – specifically, the Ape Escape remake, on the PSP, which bettered the original in a number of ways. ![]() To quote Jane Austen: it is a truth universally acknowledged, that anyone in possession of a good game, must be in want of a monkey. There hasn’t been a video game in the medium’s history that hasn’t been made better with the addition of monkeys: TimeSplitters (its creator agrees with me), Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, Tales of Monkey Island, of course, and Super Monkey Ball, a game that would be hollow, quite literally, without them. It’s a great shame, especially considering the monkey-positive data available to us. Sadly, it’s one that doesn’t come about in life all that often, and it’s one that video games, with their endless capacity for wonder, haven’t indulged with nearly enough gusto or frequency. The chance to plunge a net over the head of a monkey is one that mustn’t be overlooked.
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