Samba de Amigo

This was a recent eight dollar purchase that I never should have made. Samba de Amigo was a chore. A brief one, costing no more than four or five hours of my life to complete, but a chore nonetheless. It's a Wii port of a Sega Dreamcast game which itself was a port of a Japanese rhythm arcade game. The protagonist is none other than "Amigo," the psychotic bug-eyed monkey you can see above on the game's cover. You operate with two Wii remotes (innovative, I'll admit) serving as two maracas. Each remote can be pointed either up, straight ahead, or down, making for a total of six possible directions to shake your maracas. And that's all there is to it, aside from posing (holding your maracas still in various direction combinations) and dancing (shaking your two maracas back and forth rapidly between two positions). The song selection isn't even all that bad, and I was surprised by how many Latin American songs I knew. The game also does a great job interspersing some modern hits in with the contemporary salsa, as "Asereje," "the Macarena," "Take on Me," and "Mambo No. 5" play alongside familiar stuff like "la Bamba" and "Tequila." There's only one flaw with the game, really. The problem is that it's a huge one. For whatever reason - hardware, software, or just the Wii being the Wii - the game is incredibly anal and finicky about where you need to hold your maracas in order for the maraca shakes to register properly. Worse still, sometimes the game will flat out shit the bed and briefly stop registering shakes from a certain maraca, even if that Wii remote had freshly changed batteries and was working fine all song. And one minor brain fart by the Wii controls every now and again wouldn't be such a big deal if the game's scoring system didn't penalize you so severely for missing a single note. But it does penalize harshly, so it is a big deal. It nearly ruined the game, and certainly brought it down two or three rating levels. We're talking a potential seven knocked down to a four. A decent game made more frustrating than enjoyable by a combination of sloppy controls and an absurdly harsh scoring system. Does that sound like the kind of game you want to spend four or five hours on? Eight bucks or not, this game just wasn't worth the trouble.