![]() There’s quite a robust unlock system for cosmetics, which lets you buy accessories from hats and shirts to brand-new heads for Amigo, the cartoon monkey star of Samba de Amigo: Party Central. The scoring system is incredibly obtuse, ranked in thousands of imaginary “viewers,” but you can win some fun, silly outfits for your avatar by playing. Aside from the standard rhythm mode, there’s Streamigo! - a streamer-themed campaign mode that challenges you to fulfill objectives like score streaks in each song to rank up. If you happen to like the music on offer and like the sound of a rhythm game that’s more about striking silly poses than mastering technical performances, there’s at least a lot to do in Samba de Amigo. Multiplayer is the way to go in Samba de Amigo: Party Central, but even then it’s not great. The difference is that those games were actually fun to play. But the same was true of DDR and other music games I’ve enjoyed. To be fair, I’m far from the game’s target audience I’m a jaded old lady whose musical taste has been described as “songs for sad lesbians.” I don’t even recognize most of the tracks in Samba de Amigo: Party Central, much less have any fondness for them. Geils Band’s “Centerfold,” and a remix of Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” that just made me angry it wasn’t the original. Party Central does away with that, filling its soundtrack mostly with a collection of pop songs several years past their prime, some truly perplexing classic rock tracks like J. The original focused mainly on Latin music, rather than the typical pop and rock of other rhythm games. There’s so much going on that it makes tracking sets of brightly colored notes on top of it the game’s biggest challenge, and a great way to give yourself a headache.Īnother thing that set Samba de Amigo apart from its peers was its soundtrack. Anthropomorphic animals in rave outfits and bondage gear dance on every surface, and the UI constantly pulses with still more color. Every inch of the screen is dripping with so much multicolored neon it’s hard to even process it all. I would describe Samba de Amigo: Party Central’s aesthetic as a malevolent version of Lisa Frank. SegaĮven when the game reads your input correctly, your eyes might have trouble keeping up. There are at least plenty of customization options, if you end up diving in. But plenty of other problems show up to seal the deal. Samba de Amigo’s terrible controls are such a big problem they would make the game nearly impossible to recommend. You can also choose to play using button inputs instead of shaking your Joy-Cons, which is a bit more accurate, but saps all the potential fun out of the game. ![]() ![]() There’s no penalty for shaking your controller too early, so waving your arms as close as you can to the right position and hoping for the best is an entirely feasible strategy most of the time. Sometimes I barely flicked my wrist and registered perfect hits sometimes I would shake the Joy-Con wildly and not have it register at all. The problem is, Samba de Amigo: Party Central is terrible at tracking your position accurately. A few twists change things up, like poses that require you to hold still in certain positions and trailing arrows you need to follow along their path. ![]() Players need to hold the left or right Joy-Con in a high, middle, or low position and shake it when a note hits the corresponding target. In Party Central, as in the original Samba de Amigo, notes move out from the center of the screen toward six targets displayed in a circle. Samba de Amigo: Party Central’s aesthetics get in the way as much as its lousy controls. Put simply, it’s perhaps the least precise rhythm game I’ve ever played. That change made Samba de Amigo a lesser game on Wii, and the same is true of Samba de Amigo: Party Central. The Wii port ditched the original’s maracas in favor of the Wiimotes, which Samba de Amigo: Party Central replaces with the Switch’s Joy-Cons. Players used these special controllers to match onscreen notes in time with the music. One of the reasons the original Samba de Amigo stood out was due to its extremely silly maraca peripherals. Since then, the only entries in the series have been an updated version of the Dreamcast game and a 2008 Wii port that failed to live up to its predecessor’s charm. The original Samba de Amigo was released in arcades in 1999 and on the (beautiful and perfect but doomed) Dreamcast in 2000. If you didn’t know that Samba de Amigo: Party Central is the sequel to a well-loved rhythm game, you’re probably not alone. Samba de Amigo: Party Central fails this crucial test so thoroughly that it’s hard to imagine what audience it was even made for. A multiplayer game with the word "party" in its title should, at minimum, be able to liven up obligatory family gatherings or occupy a group of people too inebriated to hold a conversation but not ready to go home yet.
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