Well I thought it was OK. That could be due to the fact that I’m well into the music bizz, though, and it gave me a taste of what to expect when I finally make it as an international pop hero. The graphics are a touch basic, with Speccy-like attribute blocks around some of the figures, but they serve their intended purpose. I thought that the way in which the music-style depends on the people in your group was a clever idea, giving scope for a wide range of different songs. A pity that there isn’t as much interaction as I would have liked, but there you go. Not a major success ut still pretty passable nonetheless.
The Codemasters – the epitome of the low-cost home computer publisher. They showed their good instinct a number of times, making good business with original concepts and charming ideas. Production values or size never mattered much at their price tag.
Rock Star Ate My Hamster is, in many ways, a typical Codemasters game. A wacky managerial simulation of the pop music industry, it is incredible simple at heart. Form a band, buy some equipment and then enter the loop of having them practice, play a gig, perform a publicity stunt for media attention, to go the studio and release a record.
The formal objective is to score four gold records within a year. After this deadline, game over. Likewise if all band members die, which is a much more frequent occurrence than you may think.
The point in all this being: winning is not all that important. After all, much of it is a matter of random luck anyway. The inner works of the game are largely intransparent. Each next choice is much more a matter of intuition than careful thinking or informed planning. Obvious game options, such as replacing initial equipment with better one later one, don’t even exist.
And yet, this very simplistic concept offers quite some entertainment. Like all the best budget games, Rock Star Ate My Hamster takes place not so much in the menus, but in the mind of the player.
The 1980s had been a big decade for tabloids reporting on crazy pop star antics. Picking it up from there, all sorts of fictionalized headlines pop up throughout the game. Teaming up unlikely combinations of real pop stars is good for some chuckles as well. Imagining them during practice or performing together. None of which is ever visualized in-game. Clearly, having been around in that decade and thus being familiar with the names (and their idiosyncrasies) satirized here increases the enjoyment immensely.
It has the mark of a Spectrum game written all over it. And yet, when it was ported to the Amiga, it began to really shine. The few sets graphically represented in the game brought out the qualities of the “big head” style very well. The catchy title tune never sounded better. Sure, some more music, in a game about pop music no less, would have been nice. Or having more graphical sets. But it was still a budget game on that system as well, of course.
Don’t expect too much in terms of longevity. Rock Star Ate My Hamster is meant for quick games, an easy start, just waiting for the next random event to kick in and otherwise giving your bands, records and singles funny names. Seeing how well they do versus other made-up, but somehow close-to-known songs, albums and bands. It’s sympathetic and light-hearted through and through. Though for sure, it is a single-generation game. Hard to imagine anyone younger could see the point of this one.
