By Neil Merrett
Samba De Amigo: Party Central, released on Nintendo Switch in 2023, developed by Sega
While there are a growing number of games seeking to create a satisfying sense of ‘mastering’ music, dance or even singing – one series of maraca-simulators is purely interested in giving the player a simple good time. Can there be a point to just mindlessly shaking your stuff without mastery? One long running series from SEGA argues it’s worth a shot.
Amidst the growing catalogue of motion and rhythm-controlled games, the opportunity for a gamer to pretend they are some kind of master of the maracas might not have the immediate appeal of being a guitar icon.
While its name evokes one of the most famous styles of latin dance, Sega’s Samba De Amigo series is perhaps the outright definition of party game, rather than a more precise dance or instrument simulation.
That is not to say that the player isn’t rewarded and incentivised to fling around their arms with wild abandon, occasionally hitting the some in-game beat with a well-timed strutting pose.
But the game is not really about giving the impression of mastering of an artform as much as it is shaking oneself to the rhythm of a late 2000s pop banger or 80s new wave classic.
The original Samba De Amigo was launched on Sega’s Dreamcast console in 1999. It came a full six years before the Guitar Hero series would popularise the concept of the rhythm game by effectively encourage a player to develop their dexterity in hammering buttons up and down the fretboard of a guitar-shaped gaming peripheral.
One might argue that this time spent gaming could actually be put towards learning an instrument, but that undermines the earnest escape of being able to justify playing air guitar with a sense of achievement while pretending to be a master of a rock classic.
Regardless how the fake plastic guitar might look at an outsider, when that player is literally hitting their marks, they are right up their on their own little stage without having to leave tier bedroom.
The maraca as a controller
Samba De Amigo was originally packaged with unique and now quite rare maracas that could connect to the player’s console so that every shake, strut and swing of the player’s hand and arms could be broadly read by the game itself.
The need for special digital maracas to engage with been circumnavigated by Nintendo’s ongoing development of motion controls as the standard device for at least three generations of its main consoles.
But even in the latest iteration of the gaming series for Nintendo Switch, entitled Samba De Amigo: Party Central, the advancements in motion controls have not really changed the structure or sense of challenge in the game.
Endearingly, the controls themselves seem to be relatively forgiving, favouring effort, swagger – here translated as a spirited shaking to a beat – rather than the exact precision that a player is normally expected to be able to demonstrate in a series such as Guitar Hero or Rockband.
Whether going through the game with one or two players, or even competing in online knock-out contests, Samba De Amigo on the Switch is still very much about messing around then it is obtaining some form of mastery in the game.
True, the game does provide a rating system that can provide the player with a score and in-game currency to unlockable snazzy costumers such as colourful dinosaur suits that can be worm by your in-game monkey avatar.
But achievement in the game is really about giving the player a personal sense of delivering a satisfying performance or ‘doing justice’ to a beloved song with some synchronised shaking.
It is fitting that this almost performative confidence is best exemplified by the UK’s most famous proponent of the maracas -enter Bez from the Happy Mondays.
As a musician and performer, Bez’s genius may not be for everyone, but his sheer force of made him a true character in an iconic band and era of music.
Truly, he has done it his way.
It is this spirit of strutting and performative attitude that the Samba De Amigo series seems to seek to evoke – with a very permissive form of judging how the player engages has performed in the game. The mina focus seems to be whether they have had a good time.
Even for a player that may lack a basic ability with their digital maracas, it’s truly a game about having fun.
With its bright and colourful character designs, Samba De Amigo as a series has a lot in common with the similarly transgressive music comedy game, Trombone Champ.
That game focused on requiring an absurd precision from a player that might mean the majority of performances come off as comedically farcical. Trombone Champ’s appeal can be found arguably as much as it is in humorous in-game noises that come from one or multiple players with their digital ‘instruments’ as it can be in the fleeting thrill of making a passable attempt at a classic song or national anthem.
The game is designed to be almost impossible to master – but there is a value on not completely murdering a song that is transgressive.
By contrast, Samba De Amigo: Party Central has very little concern about how accurate a player is. The game’s motion controls- whether intentional or not- seem almost absurdly forgiving, often rewarding a chaotic and windmilling approaching to shaking and shimmying the controllers rather than perfectly swinging their digital maracas up, out down, in in a certain movement pattern.
Suddenly, a gamer might find themselves questioning whether their 91 per cent ‘A’ rank rating was really a fair reflection of their shimmying to Ariana Grande ‘Break Free’
But ultimately, whether the player is able to master the several dozen songs or not is truly irrelevant to whether they actually enjoyed the effort of swinging to the beat.
Whether playing on the Switch, Dreamcast or an original arcade unit from Sega, Samba De Amigo is a true case of a game that is here for a good time, rather than a long and difficult to master experience.
It’s in many ways the most ‘Bez’ simulator.
It’s also a pleasant reminder that games can sometimes just really be about mindless absurdity – rather than a terrifying and existential open world experience about humanity striving to explore and tame a dark and uncaring world through connexion, struggle and tarmacking…..
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