A nice surprise at the media summit was a playable Wii version of Samba de Amigo, a game that holds a special place in the hearts of many music genre fans. I got to try out a few songs in both the double-remote and Wii Remote/Nunchuk configuration and noticed things weren't completely right in the build that was available.

Before a song starts, players are asked to calibrate the Wii Remotes (or Wii Remote and Nunchuk) by pointing them in the upwards, neutral, and downwards positions. I found that the calibration wasn't perfect (whether by my fault or the game's, I don't know), and that there was a bit of lag when changing positions in the middle of a song with a lot of notes.

Then again, that could also just be an excuse for being out of practice. Once I became acclimated to the controls, I was getting pretty good combos and landing things with the same consistency that I remember getting in the Dreamcast version with the maracas. After my third song I was getting C grades, which is about how well I did when I first started playing DC Samba. There are some kinks that need to be worked out in the interface, but I also feel that I could do much better with more play time.

There was one obvious problem, however. The sensitivity for shaking the Nunchuk was much different from that of the Wii Remote. While there's no way of knowing the exact reason for this, the game may have been calculating values from the accelerometer in the Nunchuk as though the Nunchuk were the same weight as the Wii Remote. Since the Wii Remote is much heavier than the Nunchuk, this theory would explain why the Nunchuk felt clumsy. Hopefully developer Gearbox can address this issue before the game is released in a few months.

Technicalities aside, I think Samba on Wii will be just as fun as the original released eight years ago. Although the game loses something without the maraca controllers (which still might be a possibility, according to Sega), I was still exaggerating poses for flair and moving my hips along with the beat. Any music game worth its salt will make you want to get into it, and I was getting into it a little. If I had more hands-on time with it, I think I would have gotten into the groove a lot more.