SEGA‘s spiky blue mascot Sonic the Hedgehog will be spin-dashing his way into the upcoming Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD, the company has announced. He’s not available from the start; rather, the Blue Blur will be a hidden unlockable character, and he’ll come with rings instead of bananas for you to collect. Neat!
Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD Gains Sonic
In addition to the rings, Sonic will also come packing his trademark speed and will also be accompanied by some nostalgic sound effects. There’s also a bunch of other hidden costumes tucked away in the game, which will be themed around Halloween.
With the Sonic franchise taking a break after 2017’s Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, this is probably the nearest you’re going to get to a Sonic fix for now.
Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz was released in late 2006, and features 100 main game stages and 50 complementary mini-games. In addition, boss battles were added to the game — a first for the series — and players and the ability to jump and enjoy character-specific abilities for puzzles stages.
Super Monkey Ball originally debuted on the Nintendo GameCube, and spawned a massively successful franchise that has appeared on numerous platforms including Game Boy Advance, PlayStation 2, Xbox, iOS, Wii, 3DS, and PlayStation Vita.
The series has been on hiatus since 2014’s mobile title Super Monkey Ball Bounce, and has been seven years since we saw the franchise on a PlayStation platform. As such, it’s about time that Sega pulled it out of the basement and revived the brand.
Interestingly, the franchise was created by Toshihiro Nagoshi, who you might recognise as the mastermind behind the Yakuza franchise. His Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has worked on a couple of Super Monkey Ball games, including Banana Blitz, although the main titles were developed by Amusement Vision.
Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz HD releases for PlayStation 4 on October 29, 2019.