Shake it baby

Last year I picked up a second hand Dreamcast, for the sole purpose of playing a single game: Samba De Amigo, which is probably my favourite game in the whole wide world ever. Alas, the Dreamcast only lasted a few brief but happy months, before it it left me to go to that great arcade in the sky. I looked around but failed to find a suitable (i.e. cheap) replacement. Until now. Yesterday I discovered a nearby shop selling refurbished Dreamcasts for the paltry sum of £20. Huzzah.

Samba De Amigo falls into the rhythm genre, in which games typically demand you perform some action in time with music. Beginning with Parappa the Rappa, the most famous is Dance Dance Revolution, a game which involves players hopping (dancing) onto one of four squares on a board in time to the beat and which in reality is far more frenetic and demanding that I've just made it sound. Samba De Amigo never quite reached the same heights of popularity as DDR, but it my opinion is no less fun. Rather than being supplied with a mat on which to boogie, Samba De Amigo offers you two maracas and a sensor which determines the height of each. The object of the game is deceptively simple - shake each maraca in the correct position (high, middle or low) at the correct time and erm... that's it. Part of the joy of the game is it's absurdity. The screen is populated with an array of typically Japanese cartoon animals (Amigo himself, the host of the game, is an overly enthusiastic monkey), and all the music is latin themed. Some of the songs are right at home, including covers of Ricky Martin's Living la Vida Loca, and Cup of life, where as others are a little more off the wall - latin themes remixes of Take On Me, and the theme from Rocky, for example. It's absolutely ludicrous, but immense fun and a good way to shed a few calories at the same time.

If you've ever seen any of the legions of Japanese girls playing Dance Dance Revolution with frightening speed and accuracy, well, that's pretty much the level I got up to with Samba De Amigo last year. I could breeze through almost all of the hardest challenges the game had to offer (well, aside from one which I'll swear no human being could possibly complete without the surgical addition of another limb). Alas, I'm shaky at best now (geddit? Maracas, shaky. Ok, I'm sorry. I'll stop), struggling to achieve 100% scores on normal difficululty level, let alone hard. But it's all starting to come back to me now. Admittedly, this is in the privacy and comfort of my own home now, well away from prying eyes, so I'm safe from the sort of mockery I'd no doubt endure if anyone ever saw me playing.

Still, having spent entirely too much time moping recently, it's good to have something that's relentlessly silly to take my mind of my non-problems. Now, where did I put that other maraca...