to be exact. We covered... whatever the hell that Hamtaro thing was. And now, thanks as

always to Felicity in Worcestershire, She of the Massive Box of Japanese Hamster Games,

we have... A FALLING-BLOCK PUZZLE GAME. With hamsters. Because why the hell not. Here’s

Hamster Club: Awasete Chu, which features numbers, hamsters, and if you don’t use

your screen-altering bombs, a jaded ex-girlfriend who pelts you with sunflower seeds. Which,

y’know, should be a good thing, if you’re a hamster. Unfortunately, in the rubric of

falling-block puzzle games, they just get in the way, like the clear puyos or those

timer blocks in Puzzle Fighter.

Um... so, yeah. Blocks fall, people die (if they get all the way up to that input shaft

right there.) The blocks, numbered 1 through (2+x), where x is the numerical value of the

difficulty setting, come down and you have to connect at least three of ‘em to clear

‘em off. Also included in the mix are “Character Blocks,” representing the particular hamster

you’ve taken as a mascot for that round. Clearing a combination of these yields a “Bomb,”

which collects in the corner of that character portrait right there. So long as you’re

spending them - which turns a chunk of the collected pile into one color - you’re in

good shape. Get too miserly with them, though, and Josephine the troublemaker shows up and

makes it rain. Sunflower seeds. Which is unfortunate, because sunflower seeds are totally Derek’s

thing. (I’m a cashew man, myself.)

And that’s pretty much the size of it. There’s one game mode, and a two-player version if

you happen to find someone else in this hemisphere with a copy of Hamster Club and a Game Boy

Color and a link cable. Frankly, I’m not holding my breath. This, right here, is the

reason DS Download Play is so wonderful: So you can spread the hamster-tinged absurdity

among your friends with abandon. In lieu of that... well, it’s a functional puzzler,

even if the controls through the Game Boy Player can be a little wonky. There are even

tricks like knocking the first block off of a particular piece, then moving the rest as

it continues to fall. Clever, but there’s some tricky timing involved. (As well as a

couple pleas to the deity of your choice that you can still rotate it after that.) But it’s

all in the name of... hamsters. Well, maybe not. There’s just a patina of hamsters overtop

of what would otherwise be a one-dollar indie game, or less. Low-rent though it may be,

there’s still a decent game underneath all the sunflower seed shells (again, a situation

I run into with Derek all too often), and once the speed starts ramping up (as it has

a habit of doing at certain intervals, just to put the pressure on), it’s an all-out

frenzy to stay alive... and not be subjected to the game-over screen of a hamster chewing

on himself. Eew.