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Your hamster’s ball will be going down plenty of ramps, rolling around in humongous tubes, launching off of inclines, and be knocked around by moving environmental pieces, the player needing to manage their movement so they can get around dangers and maintain momentum without flying off the course. In these stages, your goal is simply to get to the end of a large 3D obstacle course laid out before you, the only controls you need to worry about universally being your movement. Of the game’s three single-player modes, Hustle is certainly the one favored more when it comes to content and it serves as the backbone for the multiplayer Race mode as well. Rather than trying to marry the concepts of these two inspirations, Hamsterball instead splits them into separate modes available in one single game about a hamster rolling its translucent ball around. The reason I bring up these two games focused on ball rolling is not because Hamsterball for PS3 feels like a blend of these two concepts, but instead because it deliberately does not combine its attempts to imitate their styles of play.
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Marble Madness is a classic arcade title where the player rolls a fairly fragile marble down towers full of challenging geometry to safely make it to the goal. Super Monkey Ball is a series of physics-focused platform games where the player needs to guide a monkey inside a ball through increasingly complex obstacle courses.
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