“Samba de Amigo,” like most music games, lives and dies by its controls.

Sega helped pioneer music peripherals with “Samba” on Dreamcast, and now it’s coming to Wii this summer.

I first touched the Wii version at a Nintendo event in April and was a little disappointed. Wiimote in one hand, nunchuck in the other, “Samba” did not feel very precise. Getting the game to recognize its lower set of icons was a frustrating task.

But I’ve always been under the impression the nuances of Wii controls are much like the frame rates of games on the other consoles: the real improvements come as development ends. Thankfully, that definitely appears to be happening here.

At Sega’s media event this week in San Francisco, I went hands-on with a newer build of “Samba”– this time with two Wiimotes in hand — and came away much more impressed. Whether that’s because two Wiimotes are more accurate or the folks at Gearbox are fine-tuning their motion controls, I can’t say for sure, but I can say it feels far better. You don’t have to overcompensate as much anymore.

Unfortunately, Sega was mum on the possibilities of “Samba” featuring downloadable songs. The Dreamcast version was one of the first games to feature downloadable content on a console (even if the music was already on the disc), and the Wii version’s box art revealed there are most certainly plans in the works.

But they won’t say how it’s going to work just yet. I’m hoping the eight years since the original “Samba,” however, have taught Sega to avoid that strategy again.