An essentially fun game, the off controls tend to ruin the experience.
There's really no storyline to the game; you play as Amigo, a monkey with a burning passion for playing the maracas, and you join a bunch of other crazy characters as you party hard to some samba-infused tunes. You use the Wii remote and Nunchuck (or two remotes, if you wish) to represent your maracas. On screen, there are six targets: two high ones, two middle, two low. The object of the game is to move your arms and tilt the controllers to select these targets (highlighted by white cursors), then give them a shake when the rhythm balls overlap the targets to the beat and rhythm of the music. It sounds complicated, but it's actually quite fun in practice...for a while.
When I first heard of this Wii-make, I was a bit fearful about the motion controls, especially when using the Nunchuck. Do they respond to the game well? Yes and no. Playing the game Nunchuck style works surprisingly well, though the wire surely gets in the way when in Hustle mode, where you perform different, simple dance moves. I highly suggest playing the game with two remotes for some more freedom, though for some players this can be financially impossible.
No matter which style you choose, the controls themselves are a bit inaccurate. According to what I heard, the original Dreamcast and arcade versions of Samba used a special maracas peripheral, which measured how high or low you're holding the controllers. The Wii remote should easily been able to do the same thing, but it seems to have a hard time reading certain movements. Whenever I hold the remote up high, the game sometimes reads it as holding it in the middle.
I blame that new "target select" thing. It just doesn't work well in a game like this. Instead of reading how high or low your arms are, it reads how high or low you tilt the remote and Nunchuck. In other words, not only do you have to move your arms, but you also have to adjust your wrists to hold the controllers just right. Even if you have your arms down low, if you tilt the controllers upward, while the arms are down low, you highlight the higher targets. This game takes finesse, but most of the songs are too rapid for you to take the time to do so. This can get annoying.
Samba isn't completely broken, though. It's just has a bit of a learning curve. You'll eventually find your groove with the controllers you're using with a little practice. Once you get the controls down pat, then you're ready to play an essentially fun game....that is, if you stick with the Easy and Normal difficulties. Switching to Hard mode can be a huge pain, and it sure isn't fun. When you're shaking and swaying to a certain song on Easy mode, your moves are more stiff as you try to accurately try to hit the seemingly hundreds of rhythm balls flying at you at once. For the life of me, I still can't beat a song on Hard mode. Don't even get me started on the Very Hard difficulty. In fact, I never touched it. Hard mode alone was enough for me.
Now the one thing Samba does get right is the music. A company named Wavegroup was in charge of the music in the new Samba, and they did a fantastic job. There are some fun songs that will definitely get you moving, such as "Samba de Janero," "Vamos a Carnaval!," "The Cup of Life," and one song I haven't heard in a while, "Asereje" (anyone remember the Ketchup Dance?). There are some more familiar songs infused with a samba beat, including some obvious ones like Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca" and Rob Thomas' "Smooth," but there are others that got a complete samba makeover, such as "Take on Me" and "Tubthumping," which sound great in the game. And these tracks are just the tip of the iceberg.
Some other things I should mention: Samba Wii is Wi-Fi enabled. There's a basic leaderboard option (only used among those sharing Friend Codes, sadly), as well as a Pay & Play option, where you can purchase and download new songs to play in the game. To my knowledge, this is the first Wii game to have DLC, so it's quite an accomplishment. Another thing I forgot to mention were the mini-games, but they all have limited appeal.
As much as I wanted to play a fun game like Samba de Amigo, it looks like the Wii version was a bad way to go. It's still a fun game, don't get me wrong. But all the negative things about, mostly the controls, outweigh the positive. The music is top notch, but combining that with unresponsive controls, especially in the harsher difficulties, isn't such a good mix. I believe the original Samba, with maracas controllers, worked much better than this. If only you could have an add-on to the remote that can read higher and lower motions better than the remote alone, like that new WiiMotion Plus peripheral coming out early next year. That extra accelerometer could've made a better, more accurate Samba experience, and could've gotten rid of that crappy, inaccurate target select business. Care to try again, Gearbox?