Samba de Amigo is a frustrating experience for anyone who doesn't speak Spanish. The game's reliance on a native Spanish speaker to translate the instructions makes it inaccessible to many players. This, combined with the strange and unsettling messages within the game, creates a confusing and unpleasant gameplay experience. Overall, a game that fails to deliver on its promise of fun and entertainment.

...........Connecting to Dudss:

Samba de Amigo es un juego que habla en susurros, ocultando secretos bajo su superficie. Si bien por fuera parece ser un juego de ritmo simple, hay más de lo que parece. Presta mucha atención a las letras de las canciones, los movimientos de los bailarines y los mensajes que parpadean en la pantalla. Hay una historia oculta esperando ser descubierta, un misterio que desafiará tu percepción del juego. Sumérgete en el mundo de Samba de Amigo y descubre la verdad por ti mismo

Score: 3/10

I personally really liked this game when i was a kid, since the music was cool, the gameplay was fun, there was sonic in it, all good vibes. But I don't know if i had some sort of magic touch when i was a kid because going back to this one is quite hard in that I can't control the dang thing anymore. I'd say unless you have a high tolerance for finnicky motion controls, you probably shouldn't give this one a shot. However, I personally have a lot of fond memories with this game regardless, so I can't say I hate it or that it is something that you should seriously avoid. Maybe you might have the magic touch that I used to have.

i was never the same after seeing Sonic dance to Low Rider with a monkey playing the maracas

+ The soundtrack in this game is incredible, it had no right being this good. It sticks to a prominently Latin theme which makes it stand out to pretty much every rhythm game out there. It has so many familiar hits, like Smooth, La Bamba, Mambo No. 5, Pon de Replay, Livin’ La Vida Loca, and then some deeper cuts that are still a lot of fun. There were genuinely no bad tracks in this soundtrack, and most are cut down a bit so they never overstay their welcome.
+ Has some cool trippy visuals that highlight how creative the Sonic Team was during the Dreamcast days, there’s a lot going on in the background but it never was particularly distracting. Sometimes Amigo would just be dancing with his pals on the street or on an island, and other times it would be like a LSD trip with the background becoming a rainbow with large maracas coming out of it - it’s weird, but it works so well; I love the visual identity this game sticks to
+ The game’s main concept is a fun idea - despite the original coming out in 1999, it still feels fresh and unique. While there has been plenty of peripheral based rhythm games throughout the years, Samba was one of the more simple yet effective ones out

~ The timing is so forgiving there’s no penalty to just spamming the Wiimotes, you can just shake them all the time and just make sure you are doing the correct input. There are no “Bad” note responses, it’s either an “Amigo”, “Yeah”, or “Perfect”, which makes sense given how imprecise the controls are, but it does make the game much easier

- I thought people were overreacting with how bad the motion controls are but nope, they’re terrible. The game doesn’t even demand that much precision but the Wii still can’t be precise enough, which is extremely disappointing. Oftentimes it won’t register the correct angle I’m holding the Wiimotes so more often than not, when I would miss it would be because the motion controls didn’t pick up on it rather than me actually missing. This was extremely obvious when the game would ask you to pose, and I would be holding the Wiimotes at the same exact angle it asks me to and it still wouldn’t work. On easy and normal, the motion controls work well enough and you don’t notice much issues, but on the harder difficulties the game just struggles immensely. Often you would go from a low note to a high note almost immediately, but the motion controls can’t keep up, and I think this is in part due to the game requiring you to flip the WIimote upside down to hit the low notes, so it throws the sensors off. Superhard essentially boiled down to me just shaking the Wiimotes like a doofus and hoping it would register enough notes so I wouldn’t fail out. For a rhythm game that requires precision, I don’t understand how they botched that aspect up. This game falls into the category of those Wii games that are a novel idea, rather than a well-designed rhythm game
- I disliked how the ranking is tied to how consistent you are with hitting the notes in quick succession. The more notes you hit in a row, the higher your rank is, but if you miss too many in a few seconds, your rank tanks. In career mode, to pass you have to get a C-rank or higher on each song, and this system is just so flawed. You can play like garbage for 90% of the song but if you hit enough notes in a row at the end to scrape a C, you can pass. And the opposite is true too, if you play good for most of the song but then botch the ending, you fail. This basically means your score means nothing unless you’re chasing leaderboards.

Samba de Amigo é totalmente um sonho febril, né? Ele é uma amálgama bizarra da visão de fora do que é a cultura latina, com aquela embalagem de carnaval e de um macaco usar maracas num jogo chamado samba.

Os controles dessa versão de Wii são especificamente estranhos? Eu entendo que era uma limitação técnica, mas eu queria testar muito as maracas originais, porque é incrivelmente estranho mudar a orientação ao invés de só levantar o controle.

DITO TUDO ISSO, como é divertido esse troço! É um dos jogos rítmicos que eu mais senti que tava realmente sentindo a música enquanto tocava, lembra mais maracas mesmo do que uma guitarra de GH e é realmente divertido. Tava na hora de uma versão mais nova.

This is a game that I loved, that is very hard to talk about, because I know that is so fundamentally bad.

Samba De Amigo is a rhythm game by Sega, with a very heavy Latin-rhythm theme. Originally for the Dremacast, and then remade again for the Dreamcast (only in Japan), (almost) all the content in those two versions were bundled together and coupled with about 20 more songs to be remade for the Wii back in 2008.

The original game used special maraca controllers and a sensor bar to detect the actual height of each maraca, one in each hand. The Wiimotes have no such relative height detecting feature, so instead their "height" is determined by the way they're pointing, up, horizontal, or down. There in is where the game's biggest problem lies: It has the Kinect problem in that it just fundamentally doesn't work well enough to play the entire game. The Wii remotes can't detect their positions being changed quickly enough to actually play the harder modes. However, you NEED to play the single player modes on all difficulties to unlock not only all of the extra weird things, but also about a third of the songs in the game. There is NEEEEVER any reason that music should be locked out of a rhythm game, limited by skill level (broken or not). It's the exact same problem that fighting games had with their obsession with unlockable characters in the past decade: Not everyone has the time to grind for a million hours to unlock all of that shit, when they just wanna play their favorite fighter NOW. The Easy and Normal career modes are fun and well balanced, and I got through them just fine. I could barely even beat one stage on hard mode though, let alone even unlock super hard mode, so there were like 10 songs I can just never actually play.

It's such a shame too! The harder modes add a ton to the presentation, with not only the Samba De Amigo characters dancing around in the background, but you have backgrounds inspired by other Sega franchises with their characters dancing as well, from Sonic to Space Channel 5. Sadly, I only ever got to see the Sonic one :(

All that whining about gated content aside, the game is actually really good fun with what's there. I had hours of fun just playing songs on normal in the free-play mode. The presentation is fantastic: Bright and colorful characters and classic Latin rhythms coupled in with actually quality upbeat Western songs. Compared to something like Donkey Konga, this is a perfect example of how a Japanese rhythm game has songs that appeal to Western audiences properly.

Verdict: Unless you really like Latin music like I do, it's not easy to recommend this game in good faith with the knowledge that it's so broken. The music is great, and the normal modes are also great fun, but because of how it gates its content behind its broken harder difficulties, I have to give it a fairly middling review, no matter how fun the normal game might be. Granted, it's pretty easy to find for under a dollar, so if you're okay with that kind of stuff, it's a great way to spend an afternoon :)

A Samba de Amigo game taking advantage of the Wii motion controls and remote-like controller to create a playing maracas experience seemed like a perfect, easy, and successful formula. Yet someway, somehow, Sega royally messed this up. Maraca/instruments motion controls are not very accurate and sometimes feel like they don't even work. This happens often enough to really take away from the enjoyment of the game and unfortunately ruin the experience.

Graphics, presentation and soundtrack are good and fit the game accordingly, but the motion controls really hurt this one.