Hamsterz Life
I liked Nintendogs for a while, so I was up for giving Hamsterz Life a try. It’s super cute, which is to be expected. Just look at the official site and you’ll see cuteness from edge to edge. You start off with the hamsterz breed of your choosing 1. Golden 2. Djungarian 3. Cutie 4. Baby 5. Campbell. Of those “breeds” you can choose from two or three colors. I picked a Djungarian in a silver tone. The game had described the behavior of the Djungarian hamster in a way that made me think “Posh” would be a good name. (ala Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham)
You feed your hamster things like sunflower seeds, cabbage and strawberries. You put water in their bottle, clean their cage and brush them. You can take them out of the cage to walk around the room where you may find gifts containing food, water, accessories to dress up your hamster, different designed items for your cage or a new cage entirely. 
In the beginning you can teach your hamster words and phrases, simple things like “Good morning”. Sometimes they ask you things like “What should I say when…?” and you choose from three options. Your hamsterz will ask you to play games with them now and then which are games like a sliding panel puzzle, memory, catching fish and a crane type game in three different difficulty levels chosen at random.
Now I’m at the point where I have six different cage designs, six wheel designs, six bottle designs, seven wallpapers, and seventeen accessories. I think I have played every mini-game you can play with the hamsterz. I’m waiting for the next big thing! The official site says “Watch your hamsters grow and build his own Ham-country that other hamsters can move to…The better you raise your hamster, the bigger he becomes and the more energy he has to build a big realistic Ham-country with a bakery, school, playground, bookstore and more!”
It is unclear whether that is in the American version. People in forums I have found are saying things like “I have played with my hamster 75 hours and still nothing”. I can only hope!
Things I wish I could do are 1. sell all the extra bottles, wheels, accessories and things. You end up with 3 or more of one particular item and nothing you can do with it. 2. I wish I could choose the mini-game to play with my hamster. 3. I wish they could wear more than one accessory at a time, like earrings and glasses or bandanna and leather hat with sunglasses.
What I have been doing lately, just to rack up the playtime hours, is to let the game run nearby as I am doing other things. It’s running right now, I just look at it now and then to see if the little “play with me” icon has appeared. I’ve done that at work a couple of days now and now I have around 20 hours logged with my hamster. You can have around 5 hamsters in a save file. I have 2 right now, but if it takes many hours to get this Ham-country, it’s probably better to only have one. My 2nd hamster pretty much only gets fed and cleaned, then I switch back to my first hamster.
It doesn’t feel like as much of a chore as Nintendogs was towards the end, but it doesn’t have my full attention anymore. For a game with talking hamsters in little outfits riding roller coasters, it seems like it should be more exciting. At the moment, I’d rather be playing Puzzle Quest.
