As you will have seen in other recent posts, Sega Europe invited The Sonic Stadium to the Wii Flat in London to preview Sonic Chronicles. We were puzzled as to why we were previewing a DS game at the Wii Flat (well I was anyway) but we found out why in a shock surprise by Kevin (AAUK) that we would also be playing an early version of Samba De Amigo for Wii. First to volunteer was Dan Dyer followed by an eager-to-party me.
Having never played Samba De Amigo on the Dreamcast or arcades I didn’t know what to expect but I would soon be finding out when Kevin set up a multiplayer game and handed us each a Wii Remote and Nunchuk. We were shown the song list and given a track called Samba De Janeiro which Samba fans will recognise from the Dreamcast version and Sega Superstars Tennis.
On to the game – you play by shaking the Wii Remote and Nunchuk like maraccas. There are 6 circles on the screen in 3 different colours laid out in a hexagonal shape. The Nunchuk is used for the 3 left circles and the Remote for the right 3 circles. Blue dots appear from the center and move out to each of the circles, you have to follow by moving the Nunchuk or Remote in the direction the blue dot is heading and shake when the dot hits the circle. For the higher circle you lift the controller and drop for the lower circle.
You get more points in your score (located at the top of the screen) for being accurate in your shakes, ‘Perfect’ being the highest rating. Occasionally, the dots will come very close together causing some serious shakeage which the controllers handle quite well. Speaking of handling, I found the Remote was more responsive than the Nunchuk, sometimes the Nunchuk wouldn’t respond at all.
After I finished my turn with the game I sat and watched some of the other guys play. I thought I’d have a glance at what was going on in the background where you have Amigo and his costumed friends dancing around with their maracca’s in front of sunny, lively, Ibiza esque scenery buzzing along with the music, which really captures the essence of fun the game is going for. Graphically the game is quite pretty even at this early stage, the game didn’t have any trouble handling all the constant motion.
The music was very upbeat, lively and extremely catchy. We only got to preview a few of the tracks but we thoroughly enjoyed Samba De Janeiro and Macarena. Whether there will be any new tracks in the final game we don’t know as of yet.
From this short hands-on with the game we can say the game is shaping up to be alot of fun, people who love to party or have lots of multi-player inclined friends will enjoy this game. The game still has a few bugs such as the bad Nunchuk response and the fact the game crashed during one game between Roareye and Mark but we were informed all problems will definitely be fixed by release. We look forward to seeing how this game will turn out. Sambe De Amigo will be released for Wii this Summer.