The Wii was designed to make playing games as easy as waving your hands, a natural, intuitive process in which the Wii remote becomes an extension of your arm. But sometimes it doesn’t quite work out like that. Sometimes a Wii game turns the remote into an aggravating, clumsy device that needs to be coddled, babied and carefully positioned.
In other words, sometimes you play a game like Samba de Amigo, a rhythm game published by Sega.
The Basics
Samba de Amigo was originally released for the Sega Dreamcast in 2000. The game came with two plastic maracas and a sensor bar that lay at your feet and told the game how far the maracas were from the floor and whether they were shaking.
This made the game a pretty obvious choice to be ported to the Wii, since the remote can be positioned and shaken.
The set up is pretty simple. The game consists of the player shaking virtual maracas, represented by either the standard remote/nunchuk combo or by two remotes, to Latin music (or Latin-flavored arrangements of pop songs) while moving those maracas into the proper positions. Onscreen markers are used to tell the player to hold each controller in a high, medium or low position, shaking it as an indicator hits a marker.
Occasionally the game will indicate that a player must freeze with hands in a certain position, or require the player to move the maracas around in a pattern.
Undone by Frustrating Controls
Unfortunately the controllers are very finicky. My natural inclination when playing real maracas is to swing them downward. I could do this successfully with the maracas in the up position, but if I had to hold them in the middle position a downward shake simply didn’t register. I had the most luck flinging the remotes out to the side.
When I say I “had the most luck,” I don’t mean to say that this worked well, but that it worked less badly. Whatever I did, the game simply wouldn’t recognize all of my shaking. It is very frustrating when you are holding the controller in the correct position and shaking it vigorously while the game shows that you are doing nothing. To add insult to injury, if you miss a shake the game boos you, so I was constantly receiving unwarranted boos from the unseen audience watching my performance.
Was it Better on the Dreamcast?
As I struggled to figure out how to make the controllers work better, I checked out the Samba de Amigo forum at GameFaqs. I didn’t find anything too helpful, but I did come across an interesting discussion comparing the Wii version with the original.
A complaint several people had was that while in the Dreamcast version you could stand up and dance while playing, the Wii version worked best if you sat very still and moved the controllers just a little. This is because the Dreamcast game measured how far your maracas were from the ground while the Wii version tracks what position they are in; pointing the controllers up is the same as holding them above your head in the original.
I can’t personally compare the Wii version with the original, which I haven’t played, but it is true I did best if I sat very still and made small, controlled movements. My feeling is that in a rhythm game, small controlled movements are not nearly as much fun as big, fluid ones. (If you want to see gamers playing both versions of the game, and doing much worse with the Wii version, check out this video).
More Aggravating than Fun
Besides the main game, there are a few mini-games, including a piñata game in which you tediously bash a pinata and a tennis game I couldn’t figure out. None of them are particularly worthwhile.
While Samba de Amigo has fun songs and colorful characters partying onscreen as you play, I never had much fun playing the game. Every new song was simply a few additional minutes of frustration. Playing a Wii game should feel as natural as shaking a rattle; playing Samba de Amigo feels as unnatural as shaking two live rattlesnakes in time with the music.
