Samba de Amigo wants you to shake it without shame

polygon.com:

During the halcyon days of the Sega Dreamcast, gamers were awash in dedicated gaming peripherals. We fished for bass (and flexed in SoulCalibur) with Sega’s fishing controller. We typed zombies to shreds with the official Dreamcast keyboard. Virtual-On: Oratorio Tangram was truly playable in the home, thanks to the Dreamcast Twin Stick.

Then there was the Samba de Amigo maracas controller, a one-off musical peripheral absolutely necessary for enjoying Sega’s Latin-music-powered rhythm game to its full potential. We may never return to that glorious era of peripherals, but Sega is giving the inventive rhythm game franchise another shake with Samba de Amigo: Party Central, which will let Nintendo Switch owners dance and pose with their Joy-Cons this summer.

Samba de Amigo: Party Central doesn’t require any dedicated peripherals, merely a general sense of rhythm and — this is paramount — the ability to leave any sense of shame at the door. À la Ubisoft’s Just Dance games, you will gesture, gyrate, and violently shake a set of Joy-Cons with unmatched intensity, preferably in time with the beat and lined up with six on-screen markers.

The premise of Samba de Amigo is simple: Shake your controller, at the right spot, when a circle enters a ring. There are two rings at the top, two in the middle, and two at the bottom. In practice, you’ll be shaking all over, arms raised, or crossed, or twisted as you try to match a flow of beat markers pouring out from the center of the screen. Occasionally, you’ll be asked to hold a pose, looking silly while doing so. The action gets more complicated from there.

Based on my hands-on experience with the game, Sega has retained the soul of Samba de Amigo’s colorful arcade antics with Party