Dokodemo Hamster 3: Odekake Saffron

My own Hamster died in the hurricane of 1987. Despite efforts to revive his frozen body the morning after - including taping him to the boiler - he was gone.

So I was pleased to revisit my brief youthful interest in hamsters with "Dokodemo Hamster 3: Odekake Saffron", which I picked up off eBay for about a fiver.

This is essentially a pet simulation game, of which there have been many over the years including the highly successful Nintendogs that recently came out on DS.

Turning the game on for the first time, you are guided through naming your hamster and setting his blood type (eh?). Once you have set him up, the main screen shows him pacing around a room. You control a pointer, similar to a mouse cursor, which lets you and point and click at things in the room. There's a large hamster wheel which you can click on to spin, a chest in the corner and the hamster itself.

By clicking on the chest, you get what seems to be an option screen. You can look at the calender, look at the food available, look at what tricks your hamster can do, set colour schemes, and, oddly enough, draw pictures in a basic graphics app, like MS Paint.

Click on your hamster itself and you will be asked what you want to do: you can rename him, feed him or make him do a trick. Each day that he is alive, a new piece of food and a new trick become available for you to make him do.

This is just a gentle piece of fluff but there's some quirky little screens in there, such as taking the hamster for a walk in the woods or watching him perform in a circus, which make it a kind of funny little oddity.