Samba de Amigo - Official Launch Trailer
0Samba de Amigo just isn’t quite the same without maracas controllers!
Sega’s new music rhythm game for the Switch is a silly mix of pop songs and flailing your arms around to the beat, but it’s missing the tactile feel of the Dreamcast original.
The halcyon days of plastic instrument controllers may be long gone, but there hasn’t been a moment in recent memory where I yearned for it more than while playing Samba de Amigo: Party Central on the Nintendo Switch. The new music rhythm game from Sega launching August 29th ($39.99 standard edition / $49.99 deluxe edition) successfully resurrects the long-dormant quirky darling of the Dreamcast. But as fun as it is, I just can’t shake a strange feeling that something is missing — wait, I know exactly what it’s missing. It’s missing the joyous shake of real maracas in your hands.
Back when the first Samba de Amigo came out in 2000 on the Sega Dreamcast (after debuting in arcades in 1999), it was meant to be played with purpose-built maracas controllers. You stood above a sensor bar with two bright red wired maracas, dialed in your height so the sensors could best triangulate the positioning of the maracas, and shook them to the beat in high, mid, and low positions to match the on-screen prompts as balls reached a corresponding colored circle indicating when and where to shake — along with the occasional striking of a pose.
Now, in 2023, with Samba de Amigo: Party Central, you just use a Joy-Con controller in each hand, and those high, mid, and low positions no longer rely on an external sensor bar but instead the built-in accelerometers and tilt angle. It’s simple and it works fine, but it also feels less precise.
Party Central wastes no time teaching you how to play and throws you right into its jukebox of songs. The tutorial is just a few on-screen graphics to show you how to shake high, mid, and low. The motions of the new maraca-like formula include an upright shake for the high position, a parallel to the ground shake for mid, and a downward shake for low. As for new ways to samba, there are now some Just Dance-like moves where you wave the Joy-Cons around to an on-screen flourish of a pattern or perform repeated actions like spins or fist pumps. It’s all fairly easy to learn, but you can notice a bit of the lackadaisical precision of the Joy-Cons when something as simple as a mid-level shake registers both a high and mid at the same time.
While the elaborate old Dreamcast setup was not without its own sensitivity quirks, it remains a more engaging experience since you were playing with honest-to-goodness maracas that created their own sound. It felt ridiculous, and it certainly looked ridiculous, but a big part of the charm of playing the original Samba de Amigo and its sequel, Samba de Amigo Ver.2000, was hearing your maracas shake along to the music in real life — not just coming from your TV speakers like in the new version. I know I’m well into “old man yells at cloud” territory already, but I’m here to tell you that if you ever witness two people shake maracas side by side in front of a TV to a cartoon monkey, you’re experiencing something special.
The new installment of Samba de Amigo does capture some of that hilarious spirit but now with a small disconnect. In Party Central, you can customize the maraca shake sound coming from the game, changing it to all manner of sound effects that even include beloved Sega chirps like the sound of golden rings from Sonic The Hedgehog. But the Joy-Cons remain silent. The IRL maraca sounds of the originals weren’t just an entertaining gimmick, as they also kept you honest. You used to be able to hear when someone was really off the beat or when they were trying to cheese the game by frantically shaking their maracas in an attempt to get any beat to register. Imagine the raucous sounds as someone shamefully starts building up a sweat during what should have been a simple romp through Ricky Martin’s “The Cup of Life.” While, in the new game, you can violently shake the Joy-Cons to your heart’s content to slightly cheese your way through the songs, you can’t go full Swedish Chef to register all tilts of the shaking positions at the same time. You may pass the song but not with a remotely good score (and you’ll be very sweaty).
Thankfully, that Ricky Martin banger that was recorded for the 1998 FIFA World Cup is still here in Samba de Amigo: Party Central to satiate the nostalgia crowd. And so are a handful of other classics like “La Bamba” and even the freaking “Macarena” (albeit, covers). They’re matched in the 40-song playlist with various modern pop hits like “I love It” by Icona Pop and Charli XCX and “Bang Bang” by Jessie J, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj.
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