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Man. Hamster Thursday’s been running for around two months now, and I’ve still got
plenty to go. This week, brought to you by the Hamster Queen herself, Felicity from Worcestershire,
it’s... A GAME THAT’S ACTUALLY IN ENGLISH. Man, I kinda wish I had streamers coming down
and a band playing. It’s Thursday, and I’m not beating my head against an import game!
Sure, it’s sometimes useful to lend a little bit of challenge to what would otherwise just
be a saccharine romp through a small-rodent paradise, but this time... yeah, I’m kinda
missing that challenge. Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite features the most famous hamster in
the world, trying to track down a dozen other hamsters, because the boss said so. That’s
a dozen specific hamsters, mind, as there are hamsters all over this thing. But they
don’t count. You’re looking for the most marketable hamsters. And then you’re going
to speak hamsterese to them.
I’m sorry, the correct term is ham-chat. What was I thinking? Your game consists mostly
of learning new terms in ham-chat by interacting with the various hamsters you come across
in your search, using those terms to interact with other hamsters, and spending sunflower
seeds as a form of currency because what else makes sense to a Hamster? It’s mostly adventuring,
poking through every nook and cranny, and developing your vocabulary of sticky-sweet
terms that may or may not bite on Star Wars in places. While it might be a bit tough to
digest in terms of cutesyness, at least the translation’s fairly well-done, reflecting
its status as a Nintendo-published title.
I will suggest, should you be interested in trekking through this Ham-Xanadu (a term that’s
kinda making me hungry, upon further reflection), that you pick up some sort of strategy guide.
Sure, you can try to brute-force your way through, enacting every action upon every
available hamster, but as the ham-chat dictionary expands the complexity gets greater and greater.
And, this being a Game Boy Color title, there’s a line where the “correct interaction”
gets kinda arbitrary. Still, it’s a cute little idea, and I’m certain that if you
were the parent of a kid playing this game you’d immediately begin to think they started
drinking whatever you keep beneath the sink. (A state of frustration only exacerbated by
the machine’s high-pitched squeakings and a series of dances inspired by the sprite
animations for each term.) But! I don’t have kids, and the only one who could possibly
take offense to my hamster-styled gyrations would be Derek. And he can just deal with
it.