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All good things must come to an end... no, no, not Hamster Thursday as a whole, just
the Hamster Club series. Throughout three iterations, we�ve been hell-bent on attaining
the loftiest goal in all of hamsterdom: THE HAM�S CUP. And now, in this fourth and final
chapter, we... stop caring about it altogether. And the hamster-raising bit? Out the window.
Nope, this is a text-based adventure... kinda... with minigames, with hamsters. But mostly
text. Mostly text.
Lemme at least give you the rundown: Megumi there is a typical student, with typical friends,
except that they�re all keenly fixated on hamsters. And if you�ve been paying attention,
you�ll recognize all those jerks, too! They�re the same ones who USED to be competing against
you in the Ham�s Cup, but now they�re just trying to get through homeroom without
being trampled by mecha or whatnot. Anyway! Cue snotty rich girl - bearing Josephine the
Hamster, bane of that Hamster Club puzzle game we covered so very, very long ago - gettin�
all up in your grill and challenging your hamster (one of the three - again - from the
�main cast� of the series) to a 10-meter dash. Elapsed time to the first actual moment
of GAMEplay, skipping through most of the text because we�ve seen it all already a
bajillion times: 29 minutes, 43 seconds, and 4 frames. That�s ridiculous. And then the
race itself takes something on the order of six seconds. That�s almost a half hour of
just reading about these kids� fascination with their hamsters, which I suppose could
be useful if you�re playing the game specifically for language practice but otherwise.... TWENTY
NINE MINUTES FORTY THREE SECONDS AND FOUR FRAMES.
Okay. So it�s not really much of a game, as it is a text-based... man, I don�t want
to call just getting through school an �adventure,� even if it does involve an almost paranormal
kinship with hamsters. And I really don�t want to use the other two words that immediately
spring to mind: �Dating sim.� So I�m going to disregard the primary game mode entirely
and instead delve into the minigames! Yes, as you progress through a year of a schoolgirl�s
life you unlock minigames that can be accessed freely from the top menu. (You can even play
these against an opponent at will!) In addition to the standard 10-meter dash we�ve had
since the Club first met, there are new challenges like a race to the top of a series of beams,
with a rain of heavy objects constantly threatening the hamsters as they climb. There�s also
a new cave-styled maze, featuring challenges to collect the most carrot-shaped whatchamacallits...
or to just escape at all. Granted, these have time limits of three minutes, a drastic departure
from the dash�s... six seconds. It may not be the most auspicious way to bring this club
to an end, but it certainly did. Hey, at least they kept the horrifying yawn image this time.
Special thanks, as always, to club president and founder, Felicity in Worcestershire.