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Sweet Hamster Days was initially rejected by Steam, perhaps because Valve is more restrictive of games that feature sexually explicit images of real people , or possibly for some other reason we'll never know. As a designer called Oda told Automaton , "We still don’t know exactly how the platform saw things, but after revising details such as the age rating settings and re-submitting the game, it was eventually approved."

This is an FMV game where you die and are reincarnated as a hamster named Hamta, the pet of three sisters who seem to spend most of their time gazing lovingly into the camera while pretending to pat you on the head. "We're calling it a completely unprecedented genre," Oda said, "a kind of 'being-taken-care-of adventure game.'"

The project's overseer, who goes by Katayama, gave some insight into the conception of this deeply strange idea for a game. "Years ago, I worked a part-time job wearing mascot costumes. I realized that whenever I wore a costume, children and elderly people who would normally never approach me suddenly became very friendly", he said.

The other half of the idea came from a videogame, though not one with an obvious link to an FMV visual novel about hamster-pampering. "I'm a big fan of Grand Theft Auto 5," Katayama went on to say, "where you switch between three protagonists as you progress. As I was having fun switching between the lives of other people, lives that weren't my own, I had this idea that it might be nice to have a hamster as one of the options instead of a human."

Well, that makes perfect sense then. The more prosaic reason for Sweet Hamster Days being made is the boom of FMV dating sims in Asia . "Katayama had mentioned to me that live-action games were becoming popular in China," Oda said. The Road to Empress series was a recent FMV hit to come out of China, and Korea's Five Hearts Under One Roof has also been quite popular. It's only natural a Japanese studio would want to get in on the action, and I guess making your game about someone being turned into a hamster by Truck-kun is one way to stand out.

Sweet Hamster Days is available now on Steam and the Epic Games Store .

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Spy shots show prototype electric M3 with the M Concept Neue Klasse’s hood vent.

Quad-motor powertrain could deliver over 700 hp and advanced torque vectoring.

BMW will sell visually similar electric and gasoline M3 models alongside each other.

BMW ‘s electric M3 is gradually stepping out of the shadows. The naming question is already settled, with M boss Frank van Meel confirming at Goodwood that the car drops the i prefix and simply carries the M3 badge . Now fresh spy shots from the Nürburgring show the high-performance EV wearing less camouflage than before, giving a clearer look at the production model BMW hopes will convince enthusiasts that an M car doesn’t need exhausts to be exhilarating.

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Also: BMW’s New Gas M3 Loses Its Grille But Keeps Its Six, And Maybe The Clutch Too

The latest prototype appears heavily influenced by the recently revealed M Concept Neue Klasse , which BMW showcased at Le Mans as a preview of its future electric performance models. While there’s still some disguise covering key details, the overall shape and many of the styling cues now look very close to what buyers can expect when the car finally reaches showrooms.

SH Proshots

Compared to a regular i3 sedan, this prototype looks considerably more aggressive. The swollen wheel arches remain one of the most obvious giveaways, while the car also appears to feature a wider track, rear diffuser and trunk lid spoiler, and a hood vent that wasn’t visible on previous prototypes, but did appear on the concept.

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Under the skin, BMW is expected to fit a quad-motor powertrain with one electric motor driving each wheel. While the company hasn’t confirmed output figures, reports continue to suggest the electric M3 could produce more than 700 hp (710 PS), with up to 1,000 hp (1,014 PS) possible on hardcore models later.

The real challenge, however, isn’t straight-line speed. Plenty of EVs can deliver shocking acceleration. What BMW’s engineers need to prove is that this car can deliver the balance, precision and adjustability that have defined generations of M3 s. That’s where the four-motor setup could become a genuine advantage, allowing far more precise torque distribution than a conventional all-wheel-drive system.

More Power Than Its Combustion M3 Brother

Fortunately for traditionalists, the electric model won’t replace the combustion-powered M3. BMW is expected to offer both cars simultaneously, with the gasoline version continuing to fly the flag for six-cylinder performance while the EV pushes the brand into new territory. It’s unlikely that the visually similar petrol M3 will make anywhere near as much power as the electric one, though.

SH Proshots

With camouflage steadily disappearing and testing activity ramping up, it looks increasingly likely that we’ll see the finished product sooner rather than later. Whether diehard M fans embrace it is another matter entirely.

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Related: The 10-Foot-Wide M3 Isn’t Photoshopped, But It Isn’t A BMW Either

Check out the gallery below showing the M Concept Neue Klasse to see how the production M3 EV could look when the swirly camo comes off.

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Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer re-review provided by:

Need to Know

Release date January 31, 2013

Expect to pay $20

Developer Sumo Digital

Publisher Sega

Reviewed on Core i7-6700K, 16GB RAM, GTX 980

Steam Deck Verified

Link Steam

I’m not sure anybody has ever had more fun making a game than Sumo Digital did when it made Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed.

On paper, the brief from SEGA would have been as desperately mercenary as they come: make a copy of Nintendo’s monumentally popular Mario Kart, but with Sonic. Take Nintendo’s near-perfect party game series and smear Sega’s blue weirdo and his friends all over it.

Sumo seems to have understood that it was never going to make something pristine with the materials it was given. SEGA found itself resolutely Mean Girls-ed by the end of the ’90s console wars, too scrappy to mean anything as a brand and personally victimised by Nintendo’s radiant coherence.

As mascots go, Mario is a stranger proposition than Sonic—a portly plumber is a weird hero to invest in when you’re a child—but sheer craftsmanship overruled the rule of cool. Sonic found himself too inherently ’90s to hold onto that cool very long anyway, destined for a faltering retreat from the mainstream and a new career in fan fiction.

It’s weird that the Super Monkey Ball monkey isn’t in a ball. (Image credit: Sega) The first wonderful thing about All-Stars Racing Transformed is that it accepts this: not just about Sonic, but about SEGA’s whole brand. The core cast includes everybody you’d expect: Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and so on, each driving cars that transform into planes and boats as stages change over the course of a race.

Then somebody put their hands on the crossover lever and gave it a push: you can also play as the bloke from Shenmue, who rides around in an OutRun cabinet, or as B.D. Joe from Crazy Taxi. You can play as AiAi from Super Monkey Ball, who appears to have the Dreamcast logo shaved into his head: a gang sign that only middle class ’90 kids will understand.

Somebody put their hands on the crossover lever and gave it a push

Nintendo has done this sort of thing before, of course, in the Smash Bros. series. Hell, Sonic is in Smash Bros. Not content to be outdone, however, Sumo leaned even harder on the crossover lever and snapped it off, wholesale embracing Sega’s latter-day existence as a publisher of sober PC strategy games.

From the archives

(Image credit: Future) This review was originally published in PC Gamer #322 (UK, October 2018) .

You can still subscribe to PC Gamer to get new issues of the magazine (in print!) every month.

You’d be forgiven for not knowing that you wanted to do sick drifts across the deck of After Burner’s aircraft carrier as a tank-driving general from Company of Heroes: but you do, you really do.

You want to fuck up Tails with a well-aimed swarm of bees as a Roman centurion from Total War. You want to fly around a level from Sonic 3 as actual human racing driver Danica Patrick.

Harvest time

You want to do it all as Racing Transformed’s inarguable star, Football Manager: just a regular man in a football-themed car who likes to bellow things like “get in!” as he tumbles from a collapsing bridge in Panzer Dragoon Saga and transforms into a boat.

I can’t express how happy I am that somebody decided to make this, that they were willing to shatter the ideal of a ’90s console brand into pieces and throw it to the crowd.