Samba De Amigo
It was one of the Sega Dreamcast’s finest and most ostentatious games. Feet planted firmly on a mat, body tense with pre-performance poise, when the first bars of ‘Living La Vida Loca’ hit the air and you began to shake in time with the music, maracas seemed like the very future of videogames.
Of course, with two wired maracas included in the game bundle, Samba De Amigo was an expensive and hard-to-find game and so only relatively few players were converted to what is comfortably the most enjoyable rhythm action game experience ever conceived. Now, eight years later, Sega is using the Wii’s wireless and motion sensing controllers to bring this maraca ‘em up to the masses, even if it will be appearing just after the salsa summer draws to a close.
For players who have spent the last few months locked in Rock Band, Samba de Amigo’s different musical tack might take a little getting used to. Here there are no staves down which notes travel. Rather you’ve six circles shown on screen, two at the top, two in the middle and two at the bottom. Your character, a sombrero-wearing monkey with a rictus grin, stands in between each column of circles, half are to his left and half to his right. Blue circles travel from the centre of the screen out to one of the six markers, indicating ‘Shakes’ when they reach the circle they’re heading towards. By matching your maraca shakes with these indicators you play along in time with the music.
The circle positions indicate whereabouts you need to shake your maraca: high above your head, at chest height or down by your sides and the combination of different maraca shakes in different positions can create fairly complex rhythms.
For the Wii version you’ll be using the Wiimote and Nunchuck (or, even better, two Wiimotes) as your maracas so, sadly, you don’t get the physical percussive sound that the Dreamcast version’s bespoke controller afforded. Nevertheless, developer Gearbox has done a good job in registering shakes and positions accurately.
As yet only some of the game’s different extra modes have been announced. ‘Battle Mode’ has competing players throwing bombs at each other when they’ve chained enough successful beats together. ‘Hustle Mode’ introduces full body motions to the standard arm shaking while ‘Love Love Mode’ matches the romantic compatibility rating between two players based on how closely their performances match.
With over 40 songs to play along with Gearbox is ensuring this is a generous package for players but whether the digital sound of maracas can match that made by the Dreamcast’s real shakers remains to be seen.
