OMG Nintendo

Samba de Amigo was a game released about five years too early. A rhythm game with custom-controllers? Fah, too expensive! Let us get back to playing to Pokemon Gold and Silver on our Game Boy Colors. Look, our real-time clock is much better than games with fun characters and catchy music!

Thanks to the Wii it's about to come back... without any need for custom maraca controllers, because hey, it's the Wii. What's kind of weird about this revival is that it's not being developed by original creators Sonic Team... but by Gearbox Software, most famous for the exhaustively long-running WWII FPS series Brothers in Arms. If you complain about there being too many WWII FPS, you are more or less complaining exactly about these guys.

So why and how did they end up working on Samba de Amigo? On a studio tour, Kotaku's Brian Ashcroft had to ask the question, and Gearbox's answer was somewhat surprising.

"We're huge Samba fans. Huge Dreamcast fans," Pitchford tells me. "We totally told SEGA they had to let us do it. People want a Samba Wii game." SEGA consented, and Gearbox dove in trying to squeeze the max potential out of the Wii-mote. Sure, Nintendo is making tons of money with the Wii. Third party devs haven't been as rewarded for Wii innovation. Case in point: Capcom's Zack and Wiki, which posted embarrassingly poor sales figures. Pitchford does point out that SEGA has hit with Mario and Sonic at the Olympics  though, that game *does* feature Mario. Still, Pitchford is optimistic.

"Third parties are doing alright with the Wii if they spend the right amount of money and time," he says. "People bought the Wii for the promise of the Wii Remote."

While, the Dreamcast version of Samba de Amigo has specially designed maraca peripherals, Gearbox has the challenge of turning the Wii-mote into, well, maraca peripherals. Here's the challenge: The Wii-mote itself is high tech, while the Nunchuk Wii peripheral is not. Sure, it does have a three-axis accelerometer, but still isn't the same level of technology that's in the Wii Remote. What's more, the Wii-mote doesn't always know where it is in space. It knows it's been moved, but positioning it can be tricky. So getting the Wii-mote and the Nunchuk to input the same? Or what about making it so players can use two Wii-motes instead of a Wii Remote and a Nunchuk? Not easy! "It's possible," Pitchford explains. "You just need a lot of smart people who can do a lot of math." Attitudes like that (and only attitudes like that) will keep the Wii out of the third party hobo gutter.

Yes, that's right: it's possible to play, nay, even to make WWII shooters without actually hating fun. Who'd have thought? Well, I'll be first in line for Samba de Amigo this go-round... now that I'm not going to be a college junior when it's on shelves, I'll probably have time to play it.