A monkey in a transparent ball, a tilted floor, and suddenly you are holding your breath over a pixel of margin.

On the gut-feeling pick, the community places Super Monkey Ball ahead of 78% of games. That is high, though it rests on few votes and needs confirming. Controller feel follows the same slope, ahead of 61% of titles, but again on only three duels. The desert island question lands right in the middle of the pack. And then everything drops: connection ahead of 21% of games, art direction 20%, sound environment 18%, fun 15%, rediscovery 15%. There is the tension. People love it on instinct, love holding it, but the moment you ask what it leaves behind, the emotion, the music, the urge to do it all again, it stops following.

That is the fate of a pure skill game. The GameCube in 2001 was not trying to move you, it was trying to make you sweat over a corridor with no railing. Against titles built to leave a mark through their world or their soundtrack, a game of physics and precision is playing a different sport from the one it is being scored on here.

So, who is it for? For you if you love the gesture, the millimetre precision, the frustration that makes you better. Much less so if you want a story, an atmosphere that sticks to your skin, a game you actually miss.