14 DAY TRIAL // 
Name the most annoying animal in the world. Yes, you've got it, it's the monkey and I'm not talking about the gorilla or the funny baboon, but about that irritating chimp that gets on everyone's nerves. Featured in many games, the pesky beast has the tendency to steal things, fight other monkeys and annoy human beings. The gamers that played Ape Escape will find many of the puzzles in Ape Academy quite familiar. We're dealing with a collection of minigames and puzzles. Is it quality stuff? Does it rival the latest Rayman installment? We'll soon find that out...
Story Take control over a small chimp and make your way to the top of the class by graduating from the Ape Academy. Follow your monkey's adventures through the 6 years of tough trials in the company of some of the strictest teachers out there. Solid storyline? Not in this game, but who needs a motivation and plot to play some minigames?
Concept & Gameplay The first contact with Ape Academy leaves a sour taste in your mouth, because of the huge loading times. This is not some sort of crime, considering that most PSP games have the same problem. No brilliant cutscenes to begin with, as you're taken directly to the game menu and you'll have to choose between the Academy Mode, Versus or Minigame Collection. Let's say that Academy Mode is the story mode and the first thing to do if you want to get the best out of the game. The Minigame Collection will remain locked till you play the levels from the Academy Mode.
Once you've become a student at the Ape Academy you'll have to start taking all sorts of tests. Attend 3 junior years, followed by another 3 senior year. It's not books, pencils and Maths you'll be using, but rather some ... monkeying abilities. 9 challenges are available in each of the school years and they're arranged inside a grid. Choosing one of them is random and you'll finish the year even if you lose in one or two levels. It's all OK as long as you do some sort of a Tick Tack Toe game on the selection grid, by completing 3 tasks on a diagonal, a horizontal or vertical line. The minigame collection is a selection of the games you unlock by playing the Academy mode and those can be played at any time. All you can get from them are various time bonuses and some figurines you can collect and see in the Showcase option from the main menu.
While the Academy is quite an annoying and difficult task to complete, the minigames can be fun. They're divided into Favorites, those that you select by pressing the Select button, mind games, quizzes of all sorts, tech games, body games and special games. The producers wanted to give gamers, especially kids a good laugh and all they managed to do is creating a pretty frustrating game with poor controls. There is no pre-definite set of controls as the button functions change from one level to the other, or even during one challenge. References are made to famous games and movies through level names like "Enter the Monkey", "Bombermonkey", "Karate Chimpster" or "Mon Quixote". There are also serious challenges, that really don't fit in with the game's profile and one of them is a general knowledge quiz with pretty difficult questions.
Most levels you'll play test your agility or the capacity of button mashing against time. This makes Ape Academy the perfect game to play for an hour, two at most, but in the long run it's just another arcade with fun characters. The few levels I really enjoyed are the Monkey football, the bowling and the Monkey Hockey, because they're really fun and the AI is not as ridiculous as it was in the previous levels. Go through the 40 minigames and find your favorite, but sooner or later you'll notice that the game doesn't quite explain what you have to do in each specific challenge and that controls are not used properly. Jumping from one rope to another is fun, but not when you get squeezed by a couple of moving walls.
The frustrating thing is that I had no idea that those walls could move. This being a game for the kids, you might think that it's a permissive one and you can re-try. Guess again! There is no re-try and each failed challenge equals an X on the Tick Tack Toe board. This makes the replayability very very low and few will be the ones to test their patience with such inhuman challenges. The worst levels? Those that involve guessing the difference between a couple of flags with Japanese symbols on them or the mindless button mashing games. Press square, triangle, up, down, left, right, L, R, circle .... is it headache time yet? The final button of the combo? It's the PSP's power button.
Video This may be a minigame collection, but you need one look at Rayman Raving Rabbids and you'll be tossing this title aside. However we must remember that Rayman was created for the Nintedo Wii, PS 2 or PC and the PSP has some graphical limitations. The backgrounds don't shine at all and the game tries to focus on the gameplay, failing in both fields. One chimp is annoying, but a whole army of them can become a living hell and I'm sure that sooner or later you'll get tired of seeing the same monkey with the same animation multiplied and called set of characters. The teachers and the other critters have all the clich? moves you've ever seen in an anime before. Some almost cutscene-like animations deliver a poor story told through text dialogs that would bore even a five year old, if he could read.
Sound If you want to hear endless monkey screams go to the Zoo, or buy Ape Academy. Aside from the jungle sounds there is some sort of music that reminds me of the Hawaii in the background. During the challenges you can hear a bass playing without a certain pattern and there will also be some famous classical songs in a couple of levels. Other than that, it's booms, silly songs and the voices of those that will guide you in this adventure. They're a bit exaggerated with their scholastic tones, but that will only be a motivation to prove them wrong when they start criticizing you. Like the rest of the game, the audio part is nothing special.
Multiplayer Playing Ape Academy in multiplayer mode is a way to torment yourself and your friends. You may want to try the share mode or the Ad-hoc mode. Sharing the same PSP and the same controls is something that reminds me of the PC games where two player shared the same keyboard and hit each other with the elbow while playing games like Mortal Kombat 4.
Wireless play has a lot of lag and it involves doing the same things from the single player mode, only labeled as multiplay. I played bowling with a friend of mine in the share mode, on the same PSP. The result? We got frustrated by the fact that player one (me) had the chance to move the bowler around, while player 2 (the unlucky friend) had no button to perform that action. Unfair fight? Bad monkey, bad multiplayer!
Conclusion Cheetah was the only chimp that made it in the media and that's not even thanks to the monkey's abilities, but to the fame that Tarzan got. Games are part of the modern media more than ever and now that the next-gen console wars have begun, who's to play minigames? Ubisoft struck gold with Rayman Raving Rabbids as it was a highly anticipated title that delivered good content and quality gameplay. The same cannot be said about Ape Academy, considering that is pales even when compared to the older Ape Escape titles.
