This is a game about adorable anime-style hamsters having their own Olympic games. Delegates from the original cast of the Hamtaro show face off with pirate hamsters, jungle hamsters, and fairy princess hamsters in 15 different games in hopes of bringing home the most gold medals and the most sunflower seeds. It's aggressively cute, but don't let that turn you away. While the walking around and talking to other hamsters is tedious and dumb, you can easily skip it and get to what makes this game great -- the excellent track and field games.
If you aren't familiar with Hamtaro there's not a lot you need to know. The basic concept is that when their owners are away pet hamsters escape their cages and have meetings and sometimes go on adventures. They say "Ham" and "Ham-ha" a lot and generally adorable and cuddly with their one-dimensional personalities. The focus of Ham-Ham Games is on the tournament mode, where you wander around playing games, talking to other hamsters, collecting sunflower seeds, and buying outfits.
The games are simply well thought out. Track and Field fans might be expecting to perform superhuman feats of button mashing, but that wouldn't work so well on a handheld with the screen shaking all over the place. Instead, the games are based on timing. For hurdles you time your jumps and you go faster if you successfully clear one, slower if you knock it down. The 100m dash has a sliding bar that you have to time your button presses on and as you get faster the slider gets faster as well. Diving is all about pressing buttons in the correct order. There are also games like tennis and beach volleyball which have clear and simple mechanics that end up making for gripping and addictive little minigames. Not all the games are perfect though, bird-back riding in particular can get frustrating even on low difficulty levels, but in general there is sure to be something you will excel at.
That's part of the genius of Ham-Ham Games. Before each event you are given the option to practice and you can practice as much as you want. If you are having a difficult time with a certain event you can go back and adjust the difficulty level of that event. If you still don't make gold then no big deal, the game certainly doesn't attempt to guilt you over a failure. Once you have finished the tournament mode it unlocks free play and you can stick to the events you like, beating your own records or playing against the AI.
There's stuff to do other than play games when you are tournament mode, but none of them are exactly gripping. You can wander around to all the different areas and talk to the other hamsters, but they are cutesy anime hamsters from a show aimed at young children, there's not exactly any gripping dialog going on. While you are wandering around you can look for not-so-secret areas that give you extra sunflower seeds. Seeds can be used to buy outfits when you go back to the club house between events and watch TV. The TV does useful things like tell you your fortune, display what outfits you can buy, and tell you who won each event that day. All this stuff is basically a time waster, and you shouldn't feel bad if you skip it and just perform event after event.
Now if you look at the box or read the manual you'll see that the link cable and connectivity with other GBAs comes up a lot. Don't get excited. You might expect to be able to do something cool like play competitive events against each other but you would be wrong. All that you can do by linking up to someone else is trade Player Cards. Player cards have your name, a little saying you put in, and your hamster with an outfit on. This is the only use for outfits, and it's not exactly a compelling one.
Other than the multiplayer disappointment, Ham-Ham Games is a good handheld game. The graphics are bright and clear, even a little cutesy, and the mechanics for the minigames are, for the most part, simple and well thought out. If you like track and field games don't let the name on the box turn you off. Ham-ha!
