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Look! Up in the sky! Is it a Quantity Surveyor? Is it a Church Warden? NO! IT’S HAMSTER
THURSDAY! Where I, TJ, take you through a slew of old Hamster-related Game Boy games,
mostly in Japanese, because my homegirl Felicity in Worcestershire just dropped a BOMB on me.
A bomb made of HAMSTERS. And we start with Hamster Paradise, where you raise a hamster!
In paradise! All with the ultimate goal of breeding the MIRACLE HAMSTER. A HAMSTER THAT
WILL NEVER DIE. It’s cute, fuzzy, Game Boy Color eugenics at its finest, screw what those
Pokemon fans have to say. Just look at the cuteness!
… okay. So maybe these kinds of games make a whole lot more sense in Japan, where spaces
are smaller and pet resources more expensive. Let’s face it, if you can buy your kid a
video game to simulate the experience, and not have to obtain the animal and a cage and
bedding and food and food and food and sunflower seeds, wouldn’t you? It’s an obvious choice.
So, confined to my Gamecube, Sando here lives out her hamster-y existence. She drinks. She
wanders around. She defecates. She engages in a wheel-running minigame. She engages in
a ladder-climbing minigame. She explores the room, if I deign to let her out of her pink,
heart-patterned prison. She chews up my copy of Hamlet, thus guaranteeing that I’m going
to fail my entrance exams and be subject to a lifetime of ridicule. She doesn’t care.
She knows she’s just a stepping stone in this joker’s master plan to biologically
engineer the perfect hamster, and she’s going to go kicking and screaming. Or just
rolling around on her back and being cute. One of the two.
One in-game day is only a couple minutes, so there’s no Pokemon-second-gen real-time
clock to worry about. Nope, you get to dote on your hamster all you want during that time,
brushing it, feeding it, tending to its every whim, making it defy gravity, and injecting
it with various off-brand pharmaceuticals whenever it magically develops an icepack
on its head. I’d love to know exactly who makes those, who manufactures icepacks so
small, but I get the feeling it’s THIS *******. Yes, because every Game Boy game needs some professor
to place into the hands of a complete n00b his life’s dream in eugenics research. Both
he, and his distressingly perky assistant, can take a powder. I don’t need their hegemony
in my care and feeding of this assemblage of bits that resembles a hamster. WE’RE
GOING TO BREAK FREE, SANDO AND ME. TO CLIMB INTO FLOWERPOTS, OR TO FASHION THIS COPY OF
HAMLET INTO A SLIDE. TO HECK WITH YOUR NUMBERS AND YOUR METRICS AND YOUR DATA! Wait, what
the heck am I saying? I think the sunflower seed fumes have been getting to me. Tune in
next week for another HAMSTER THURSDAY, when hopefully I’ll be in a better-ventilated
room!