Nintendo Media Summit: Shakin My Money Maker With Samba De Amigo
Practically anyone who owned a Dreamcast (and even many of those who didn't) was familiar with Samba De Amigo. The quirky rhythm game that featured a manic sombrero-ed monkey shaking his maracas to Latin-afied pop music was a huge hit at parties (at least amongst my friends). Using a set of wired maraca controllers, you would shake those puppies along to the beat of the music. But beat was not the only challenge. You were also required to hold the maracas at certain levels shown to you by the game: either up, down, middle or a combination of two of these. Sometimes you would even be instructed to strike a pose, holding the maracas still and following the picture on screen. Needless to say, you looked like a complete fool doing it, but that was also a lot of the fun.
Now Sega is bringing Samba De Amigo to the Wii and while the maracas may be missing, the fun is definitely still there. Instead of using maracas, you can now use either two Wii remotes or optionally, you can use the Wii remote/nunchuk combination. In my opinion the dual remote option is preferable so you don't have that wire making things difficult. The game has been reworked with all new eye popping color graphics, maintaining the style and kooky characters from the original. New music tracks have been added to the originals as well bringing the count up to over forty total songs. I asked about the new tracks, but Sega isn't ready to reveal them just yet. Can't give away the farm all at once I suppose. I did discover a little secret however: Miis will be used in the game! While I was playing, I noticed that there were Miis running around in the background, hob-nobbing with the game's regular characters. Whether it will use randomly generated Miis or the ones you have on your system remains to be seen.
Samba De Amigo is a must buy for any lover of quirky rhythm games and if everything goes according to plan, you should be able to do so in the late summer or early fall of this year. And if you are hoping for surprise maracas, don't hold your breath. If a third party steps in to make them, so be it (Hello, NYKO!) but at the current time, Sega is concentrating on the Wii remote controls only.
Fruit Brute
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 15 April 2008
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: nintendo, nintendo media summit, samba de amigo, sega, wii
*SQUEEEEE* I love Samba De Amigo! I'm glad we finally got some new info. I'm very excited. ^.^
I want to like it, but something about these character designs has always bothered me. :/