Push Button B

Game: Samba de Amigo
Purchased from: Toys ‘R’ Us
Price paid: $5.00
Platform: Wii

Samba de Amigo has a kind of convoluted history. It went from arcade game (that I could never find) to Dreamcast game (that I could never find), to re-released Dreamcast game (that I could never find), to Wii game (which I kind of forgot about). The manual to this game has a kind of a backstory, but it’s completely inconsequential. It stars a monkey that plays maracas, and that’s really all you need to know about that.

The premise is really simple. You hold either a Wii Remote and Nunchuk or two Wii Remotes kind of like you would hold maracas. Each ‘maraca’ has three positions, up, middle, and down, detected by which direction the Remote is pointing (ceiling, straight ahead, or floor). Each direction is indicated onscreen by a colored circle, and balls will flow from the middle of the display to the outside. When they’re in their respective circles, you give the ‘maracas’ a little shake. It’s one of those things that’s easier to show than it is to explain so…

And it’s really as simple as that. On the tougher difficulty levels you get alternating ups and downs, wacky dance moves you have to do, and that kind of thing, which is one of the big reasons I recommend playing with two Remotes instead of a Remote and a Nunchuk: that tether that keeps the two pieces together tended to get in my way and get snagged on things. Both could be detrimental to your experience.

The variety of songs in the game is actually pretty impressive, they run the gamut from the above ‘Papa Loves Mambo’ to ‘Low Rider’ to ‘Tubthumping’ to even ‘Pon de Replay’. 48 songs in all, which is a huge step from most of the other rhythm-based games that end up on Nintendo platforms, DDR Mario Mix had a paltry 29, Elite Beat Agents had 19. So that’s a plus.

I won’t lie, I looked around the Internet to find out what other people had to say about this game, and they all were pretty positive, but one issue kept coming up, so I should probably address it here: the accuracy of the motion detection.

This game came out before the Wii Motion Plus accessory did, and that really would have helped with the accuracy. But, by and large, it’s unnecessary. I only ran into problems with the controller not knowing which direction I was pointing in four specific situations:

1. The batteries in my Wii Remote were running low
2. I was sitting down instead of standing up (you really need to stand to get the full enjoyment out of this game)
3. The action got fast and furious and I forgot that you have to orient the controller vertically to hit the ‘up’ beats and instead just raised my arms over my head, but kept the remote level and
4. I tried to go from ‘Down’ to ‘Up’ too fast and the controller couldn’t keep up, this was usually in conjunction with #3

So, yeah, Wii Motion Plus would be nice, but not needed.

I should also note that there are three ‘download packs’ of songs available for this game, each containing three more songs. Each of the packs costs 500 Wii points, which at current exchange rates is $5, so I haven’t downloaded them. I have a mental block about paying triple the cost of the game to get all of the extra goodies (though, ‘The Rockefeller Skank’, ‘Mickey’, and ‘Love Shack’ should be fun songs to do).

It kind of makes me sad to buy an actual good game on the cheap, well, for this cheap. That usually means that the game didn’t sell very well to begin with for whatever reason. And that means that there probably won’t be any sequels, no remakes with the Wii Motion Plus, and no more song packs (the last one came out around 18 months ago). But on the flip side, it’s probably the best $5 I’ve spent in weeks.

Game: Farm Frenzy
Purchased from: Wal-Mart
Price paid: $4.96
Platform: PC

It’s not too often that I’m lured into purchasing a game simply because it has cartoony farm animals on the cover. In fact, I can’t think of any time that’s ever happened. No, what drew me to this game was was the giant, red $4.96 price sticker on the box, the promise to ‘Join 20 million players!’, and the promise to ‘Show Old McDonald how it’s done!’ (No, not the five star review rating. Sorry, Gamezebo, I don’t take your reviews too seriously.)

So what’s Farm Frenzy all about? Shockingly, the back of the box isn’t real helpful, so let’s take a quick look at a screenshot

The game mostly revolves around caring for animals on your ‘farm’. The only things you can do to them are: purchase more of them, and water the ground, which produces grass. The animals eat the grass and fart out goodies for you to collect. Collect the goodies and either send them to the shop in town to sell them, or spend a few seconds processing them into finished goods. For example, eggs become ‘egg solids’ (whatever that is), egg solids, become tasty cakes, and tasty cakes become $80 when you sell them at the market (eggs go for $10).

Occasionally bears will drop from the top of the screen where they’ll rampage through your farm and punt your animals off into the horizon, which is pretty hilarious to look at, but ultimately bad for your progress.  Since a goose hurtling through the ionosphere is laying eggs you can’t get your hands on, you’re going to want to trap the bears by clicking on them a bunch of times, which puts them in a cage. You then put them in your warehouse and then ultimately sell them somehow at the same shops that take eggs, egg solids, and cakes.

So what you end up with is a game where you manage workers that produce resources while consuming other resources, build buildings to produce other, refined goods, and unfriendly-types that occasionally come in to wreck up the place. Sounds to me like we’re dealing with a simplified real-time-strategy game, and while it’s no Warcraft, it’s still decent.

It’s interesting to note that this game is also available for free (as in, $0) from the developer’s website, and lots of other sites around the ol’ Internet. The catch? You only get to play the thing for an hour before you’re expected to pony up a few bucks for a full version. Sounds like a fair deal, right? My only problem is that one hour was about all of this game I wanted to play. Mostly because I got past the ‘gimme’ stages and the difficulty ramped up further than I wanted to go with it, but also because clicking on animal products, turning them into sellable goods, and catching bears with repeated mouse clicks gets old kind of fast.

Or at least fast enough that I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen everything that I want to in this game.

One of my weaknesses is that if I’m strolling through a store and I find a game priced below $10 I’m pretty well obligated to buy it. Usually to see how bad it is (sometimes games are so bad that they’re awesome), but sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised. But what all that means is that I’ve got lots of those cheapo games and a forum to tell you all about them. But first, a couple of qualifications: The game has to be new (no used or gifted games), and it can’t be part of a sale package (like buy one get one half price).

And with that out of the way, here we go

---

Game: Flipwords 2
Purchased from: Target
Price paid: $4.98
Platform: PC

I was not fortunate enough to actually play the first Flipwords game, so I got into this one not really knowing what to expect. It’s kind of hard to describe what the game’s about without showing, so let’s start with a screenshot.

At first glance, there’s a lot going on here, but it’s actually slightly less complicated than it looks. At the top of the board you have the Secret Phrase, and it’s your ultimate goal to guess the phrase, Wheel of Fortune style. But you can’t just choose letters willy-nilly, that’d be way too boring. Instead, you have to use the grid of letters in the middle of the screen to form words, Bookworm style. Words must use contiguous selections of letters, but can go in any direction once you’ve started. Find a word, get some points, and if the first letter of the word you found is in the Secret Phrase, that’s revealed.

Adding an extra layer of complexity is the limited amount of turns you have to work with. Every time you find a word, whether it reveals anything in the Secret Phrase or not, it goes down by 1. Once you’re out of turns, you get one last chance to guess the Secret Phrase. Blow that, and it’s game over for you.

You might notice that down in the corner it says ‘Classic Mode’. There’s also a ‘Strategy Mode’ that has differences so minor that I’m not going to bother going into them here, and ‘Party Mode’ where you get to play with up to 3 more people. Yeah, I didn’t do that.

But even better than three (yes, three!) game modes is the ability to create new Secret Phrases and to download new ones from the Internet. And even though I wasn’t downloading great gobs of new phrases every time I tried, I did get about 4 dozen new phrases each time I updated, which isn’t too shabby for a game that came out in 2008.

Even more surprising is that this game has leaderboards. And even though the top couple of spots look like they’ve been taken by cheaters, positions 4-20 are totally up for grabs. (J Train, I’m coming for you!).

So what does all that mean? It means that I got more enjoyment out of this game than I would have if I would have flushed my $5 down the toilet, and I probably won’t immediately uninstall it as soon as I post this, if that means anything to you. And I sure hope it does, because it didn’t mean much to me.