Within each of the four difficulty levels are roughly five stages, each with a number of songs to run through. The main career mode serves as a means of unlocking the 40-odd songs and numerous throwaway unlockables (like maraca sounds). You WILL smash each other to bits.Īs with the Dreamcast original and its Japanese-only Ver.2000 upgrade, there are quite a few modes eked out of such a straightforward game mechanic. Best not to engage in close quarters multiplayer gaming. While suitably inebriated, this could be the stuff of legend. In short, you'll look like an absolute banana while you're doing all of this, but that's obviously the point. Posing involves holding the maracas still in the direction of the highlighted circle, while hustling is a little more involved and tasks you with rapidly waving one or both of your maracas between the illustrated positions. Occasionally during all this maraca shaking madness, you have to 'pose' or 'hustle' in the manner depicted. As you might expect from a rhythm game, the objective is to get the timing right and build up your score multiplier, ending each song with the highest possible score and grade. An amusing, brightly coloured animated scene plays out in the background and the screen is overlaid with six markers, telling you whether to shake up, down or in the middle as the blue dots hit them. In what amounts to a slight variation on the Dancing Stage gameplay, you have to shake the maracas (in this instance the Wii remote and nunchuk) in the appropriate direction at the right time.

The gameplay couldn't be much simpler, and nothing fundamental has been changed from the DC original (including the visuals these remain as striking as they ever were, with the addition of Miis). He's undoubtedly had his fill of bananas, and now wants to express his undying love for latin rhythms by shaking a set of maracas in time to the joyous music. You play an unhinged-looking, square-headed, sombrero-wearing, maraca-shaking monkey. The premise is utterly daft, and the game is all the more endearing for it. The superb maraca controllers remain, to this day, the most joyfully silly gaming peripheral ever made. If you're one of the 2000 UK gamers who bagged one, lucky you. Fondly remembered for being one of the more outlandish rhythm-action games of the early part of the decade, its GBP 99.99 price point and ridiculously limited release on Dreamcast meant that Sonic Team's effort became little more than a collectible curio. But with a completely overlooked ace up their sleeve like Samba De Amigo, you can't blame them at all. Re-issuing dusty old back-catalogue titles on the Wii isn't perhaps the most imaginative or exciting thing SEGA could have done.

Dreamcast samba de amigo