I've always been a little bit weary of the Samba de Amigo games. Something about flailing plastic maracas around coupled with my total lack of coordination seems... dangerous. I have no sense of timing or rhythm, my body moves with the grace and flow of a marionette. I'm lucky I don't have kids because there won't be video footage of me accidentally beaning them in the face with a joycon, but the potential for self-harm is still there... "1... 2... 3... jump!" and my hands go directly through the lights of my ceiling fan. Spending the night getting glass picked out of my knuckles in the urgent care. Terrible. Why would I sign on for that?

Well, the allure of a good deal, for one. Big thank you to Sega for sending Samba de Amigo: Party Central out to die so I could grab it for a cool 14$. Also, I do like to party (alcoholic) and I love to get down (on the ground because I drank too much), so I spent some time clearing furniture to make a good open space and moved my collection of priceless Victorian era porcelain dolls out of the way and finally played me a little Samba de Amigo.

Party Central is remarkably easy and probably the best time I've ever had with a rhythm game in terms of sheer personal performance. I was pulling A and S ranks with ease because it's just so lenient, almost comically so, and while the low skill ceiling might be a problem for some, waving my arms around like Kermit and still being told "aw, good job, buddy!" made me feel pretty great! The StreamiGo mode, which adds additional objectives like getting less than three boo's or clearing with a set score, adds a little extra challenge and replay value, and I do think the whole conceit of Amigo trying to build clout as a streamer is pretty funny. He's gonna have to switch to hot tub streams eventually, that's... that's where the money is. Subscribe to Amigo's OnlyFans...............

I did encounter a lot of issues with misread inputs and latency but honestly, that might just be my Joycons. I've long been suffering from drift despite barely using these things, the Joycons are hands-down the worst controllers Nintendo has put out, which is quite an accomplishment all things considered. Bad form factor and cheap parts... it would not surprise me if I simply have poor form, but I'd be even less shocked if this was a hardware issue. Still, Party Central is so forgiving that it never became more than a minor annoyance.

If you're as rhythmically impaired as I am, you might actually get something out of Party Central and considering how cheap it is (Sega had like, zero confidence in this, huh?) it's a pretty easy pick up. Just make sure you have your Joycon straps on or you'll fling one of them directly into your porcelain doll collection and straight through the window and directly into the face of the neighbor's kid and spend your whole morning writing this review on hold with the insurance company

i'm in a lot of fuckin trouble, man

NOTE: I played the Meta Quest version and have to review it here because Backloggd hasn't flipped the switch on the Quest game's page yet (still has a 12/31 release date).

Samba de Amigo in VR is the final form of this game. I never played the Dreamcast one but I did play the Wii one and the demo of the Switch game and found the controls in both cases to be highly compromised.

Samba de Amigo: Virtual Party, a Meta Quest exclusive VR port of the Switch game with (I'm 95% sure) complete feature and song parity, is everything I always hoped I would get out of this series. In first person with excellent maraca tracking/shaking effects, I really felt like I was playing this game the way it was meant to be played. In fact, contrary to the flat-screen port, this version of the game is so intuitive I was doing songs on the hardest difficulty in the first hour of playing (okay maybe it's a little easy as far as rhythm games go but still!).

It plays exactly the same as its console brethren too; you're doing the same shakes, the same poses, the same Elite Beat Agents tracing, and the same fun little minigames. Except it completely works! And, secondarily, it's a pretty good workout. I regularly burn 400 calories per 45 minute session. Unlike other rhythm/workout games in VR, you aren't over-exerting joints or bending too much so I'm finding it to be a very sustainable light exercise.

I do agree with feedback that the song list leans non-Latin pop heavy -- I would have enjoyed even just a Lou Bega/Sean Paul song or two -- but the song list has Escape to the City, Centerfold by J. Geils Band, and Pompeii by Bastille so I am still having a pretty good time with it. A bit more music would have been nice too.

My main criticisms are (1) that although the tracking works mostly perfect, every one out of nine or ten times, the tracing or a more complicated dance move might struggle to pick up. Hard to tell if it's me (though the tracing does ask a bit too much of you on higher difficulties I feel) or the game; and (2) The included campaign mode is a little barebones.

It gives you 80 missions which are all pretty fun, including combo challenges, score/rank/perfect challenges, and VS. mode boss battles against Samba De Amigo characters where you have to out-score them. The premise of you being a dance streamer building followers by doing missions is a fun premise, but there is basically no writing or cutscenes or flavor. Just missions and a number going up. In fact, after I beat what is effectively the final boss, there was no ending nor even credits to roll. It just kicked me back to the missions.

So, yeah. Kind of a barebones package with a few small issues but, on the other hand, also an amazing rhythm game that low-key realizes the potential of this franchise? Why is no one advertising this game? It's so good and no one is talking about it so I'm convinced I might be hallucinating the fact that it came out.

P.S. If you get it on Quest, go to the comments of the user reviews on the Quest app and use one of the spam comment coupon codes to get it for 25% off. It's launching at $30 (cheaper than the identical but inferior Switch release) so if you use one of those codes you can get the game for like $22-24 I'm guessing. And you absolutely should.

Don't get me wrong, it plays nice and looks great.
But for rhythm games, what it REALLY comes down to is the song choice, which can make or break a game. And for this one, it's a big miss for me personally. It felt more like a Just Dance mod for Samba, and almost all the songs here are western pop, most with no latin influence, let alone any Samba or Samba-adjacent music. Just having a latinoamerican person doing standard pop doesn't make it latin music.

That's not to say the song selection is bad, it's just not for me. I know a bunch of people who would LOVE these song picks, but for me it was quite disappointing.

Samba De Amigo: Party Central, as it hints at in the name, is a party focused rhythm game. Using the Joy Con like maracas, you have to shake them in time with the music to try and get a good score. Notes are sent to 6 different directions on screen (top, middle, bottom, on both left and right sides) and to hit these different notes you have to tilt the Joy Con in the right direction. Straight up for the top notes, horizontal for the middle notes, and titled down for the bottom notes. While this does work to a surprising degree, it does also lead to frustrating moments as notes are missed because the gyro of the Joy Con had become desynced. This issue is more frequent when songs ask you to make big gestures like arcs or zigzags because you don't get enough time to realign the Joy Con once you notice it's been knocked off centre from doing a lot of motion with it.
Now there is an option for button controls which could be helpful for those who don't like the motion controls but personally I found the beat maps to have been designed around shaking which meant the button controls never quite felt comfortable to me.
Despite my issues with the controls, I did manage hit some perfect scores with the motion controls and it nails that rhythm game feeling of achievement when you do manage a perfect.

The song selection is mostly a bunch of greatest hits from recent pop culture with artists like Ke$ha and Carly Rae Jepsen and whether you like that or not is down to personal taste in music. For me the selection was fine, I found a decent amount of tracks that were fun to play along to but the dlc songs were a lot more to my liking with songs from Sega games like Sonic, Yakuza, and Space Channel 5 as well as a Japanese selection with stuff from Jujutsu Kaisen and Hatsune Miku.

There's a bunch of things to unlock through playing the songs like costumes and different styles of maracas as well as a generous amount of online multiplayer stuff and leaderboards to compete in if that sort of thing interests you, so it's a pretty comprehensive rhythm game package.

If you have an itch for a fun party rhythm game, then this should provide a decent scratch for it. However some issues with the control scheme stops this game from reaching its potential, though it still manages to provide a decent experience despite that.

Nunca entendi esse mix brasil/méxico mas sempre amei o Amigo, é bom finalmente voltarem com ele.

A playlist é bem estranha, indo de Ariana Grande, passando perto do estilo latino e chegando em Bon Jovi, sei lá é meio estranho kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
A experiência com controle de movimento é mista, não é 100% responsivo mas também não chega a ser frustrante, talvez meus joy cons não ajudem tanto pois são de 2017 e ainda seguem vivos. É uma boa opção de party game e se for jogar sozinho, use os botões pra jogar de maneira mais sólida.

O único crime desse jogo é não tem Samba de Janeiro pra jogar, sinceramente......

When I first saw the joycons during the Switch reveal I knew I wanted Samba de Amigo on the console, so to finally see it become a reality was great! Thankfully for the most part the controls have been responsive, even on harder difficulties. There's a lot to love here, like the random prompts you can get during a song that helps each run feel fresh, the many customization options for Amigo, the online modes, and the career mode StreamiGo! I'm making my way through it and it's been a good time, a bit of a challenge too! The song lineup here isn't half bad either, although I may biased because there's some Sega and Sonic tracks here and XS by Rina Sawayama LOL. Looking forward to the rest of the dlc tracks and I hope we get some more down the line. We are so back

Party Central (and by extension its Apple Arcade port) is as faithful as a SDA sequel can get while including its own thematic flair and new mechanics that add more of a sense of hype to the mix and expand on the series as a dancing-leaning rhythm game.
Its soundtrack’s perfect and the other modes are neat too, I’m even cool with the decision to make note detection and motion gesturing way more lenient than previous games, I’d say the only real area where the game falls short is mechanics like the inbetween minigames and arrow notes not being implemented as elegantly as they could for the charts to leave more of a lasting impression.

As a sucker for Sega, this is what I'm looking for in a rhythm game. While I may not agree with the focus shifting from strictly Samba to Latin Pop, I can't argue that they picked some winners for the track list. I felt myself really getting into the song just like Amigo was. I'm definitely putting a track or two from here on my Spotify playlist.

I will also say that the added Battle Royale Mode, added Mission Mode, and extra love for DLC track packs, this definitely is one of Amigo's best games out of the trilogy. Hell, just the fact you have button controls instead of strictly motion makes this the best rhythm game Sega's put out. If you're curious, try out the demo. I think you'll be happily surprised.