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Here on HAMSTER THURSDAY, we’ve covered Hamster-raising simulations. Five of ‘em,
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to be exact. We covered... whatever the hell that Hamtaro thing was. And now, thanks as
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always to Felicity in Worcestershire, She of the Massive Box of Japanese Hamster Games,
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we have... A FALLING-BLOCK PUZZLE GAME. With hamsters. Because why the hell not. Here’s
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Hamster Club: Awasete Chu, which features numbers, hamsters, and if you don’t use
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your screen-altering bombs, a jaded ex-girlfriend who pelts you with sunflower seeds. Which,
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y’know, should be a good thing, if you’re a hamster. Unfortunately, in the rubric of
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falling-block puzzle games, they just get in the way, like the clear puyos or those
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timer blocks in Puzzle Fighter.
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Um... so, yeah. Blocks fall, people die (if they get all the way up to that input shaft
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right there.) The blocks, numbered 1 through (2+x), where x is the numerical value of the
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difficulty setting, come down and you have to connect at least three of ‘em to clear
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‘em off. Also included in the mix are “Character Blocks,” representing the particular hamster
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you’ve taken as a mascot for that round. Clearing a combination of these yields a “Bomb,”
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which collects in the corner of that character portrait right there. So long as you’re
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spending them - which turns a chunk of the collected pile into one color - you’re in
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good shape. Get too miserly with them, though, and Josephine the troublemaker shows up and
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makes it rain. Sunflower seeds. Which is unfortunate, because sunflower seeds are totally Derek’s
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thing. (I’m a cashew man, myself.)
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And that’s pretty much the size of it. There’s one game mode, and a two-player version if
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you happen to find someone else in this hemisphere with a copy of Hamster Club and a Game Boy
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Color and a link cable. Frankly, I’m not holding my breath. This, right here, is the
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reason DS Download Play is so wonderful: So you can spread the hamster-tinged absurdity
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among your friends with abandon. In lieu of that... well, it’s a functional puzzler,
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even if the controls through the Game Boy Player can be a little wonky. There are even
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tricks like knocking the first block off of a particular piece, then moving the rest as
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it continues to fall. Clever, but there’s some tricky timing involved. (As well as a
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couple pleas to the deity of your choice that you can still rotate it after that.) But it’s
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all in the name of... hamsters. Well, maybe not. There’s just a patina of hamsters overtop
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of what would otherwise be a one-dollar indie game, or less. Low-rent though it may be,
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there’s still a decent game underneath all the sunflower seed shells (again, a situation
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I run into with Derek all too often), and once the speed starts ramping up (as it has
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a habit of doing at certain intervals, just to put the pressure on), it’s an all-out
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frenzy to stay alive... and not be subjected to the game-over screen of a hamster chewing
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on himself. Eew.
