Original Release: Nintendo, 2004, Game Boy Advance
An Olympic-themed outing for the Hamtaros that came as the fad was already on the way out in the US
Hamtaro: Ham-Ham Games (GBA, Nintendo, 2004)
Where to Buy: Amazon
How to Emulate: coming soon!
Review by: C. M0use
Hiding behind the cute exterior is one of the most brutal and grueling sports competitions you’ll find in the video game world … well, I may be exaggerating a little, but the game is often very frustrating with either iffy design, weird and fussy controls, the CPU player being too overwhelming, or some combination of the three.
We visit the Hamtaro world of 20 years ago as they have their summer games. This is a diverse range of about 14 events, that includes some of the expected Olympic favs like track and field stuff, swimming, beach volleyball, tennis and so on. But you also get a couple of unique hamster oddities like carrot-pulling and bird riding.
The first issue is that it doesn’t seem to have an “exhibition” or “arcade” mode to just play each of these games freely. When you boot it up it’s railroading you into making a “player card” for online swapping, whether you plan to do that or not, and then you’re dumped into Hamster World where wandering around talking to other hamsters and finding hidden nuts (inexplicable at first, but you eventually discover they can be traded to one particular hamster for new costumes). It’s a cute little world with a bunch of dialogue and some little things to interact with, but it’s also kinda unnecessary padding between the events.
The events unfold on a strict daily schedule, and you can only play the current one during its allotted time. You can practice one as many times as you want just ahead of actually doing it, but for whatever reason the practice mode is way more brutal than the actual event!
There’s no penalty for not winning an event, the overall goal is just to have the most total gold medals at the end of the game. But you may find you just need to muff an event whose timing you can’t really get just to get it out of the way and move on with something else. Some of them are incredibly fussy about timing and/or just have a weird and offbeat sequence of doing things, and keeping in mind this was a game aimed firmly at little kids it seems a little overdemanding when it’s tough for even experienced adults! Other events, like tennis and volleyball, are basically just a crappier version of other Game Boy sports titles with slower movement and iffier collision detection.
The game would have been much better if you could just get straight to whatever event you want anytime you want, and it’s baffling that this isn’t an option. I do get that a big part of the appeal was for kids who were Hamtaro-crazy at the time to wander around the little virtual universe, but why not just throw in more accessibility of the meat of the gameplay too? Anyway, between offering nothing to adults but iffy games accessed via a cumbersome setup and being a fad for kids that’s now over two decades out of date, there’s very little reason to go back to it.
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