Friday, 19 May 2023

Savannah Gurashi no Cheetah-san (3DS)


 That title traslates to, I think, "Mrs. Cheetah's Savannah Life", or something like that, at least. It's a pretty descriptive title, too. You play as a mummy cheetah, and you live you life on the savannah. That life consists of chasing down prey to feed yourself and your kittens, scaring scavengers away from your freshly-killed meat, and suffering high-speed head trauma until it kills you. Or maybe you starve to death. Or maybe your kittens starve to death. The problem with a cute game about wild animals is that animals don't really live cute lives in the wild, I guess.

 


So, the game puts you in the savannah, and you've got to run around looking for the small brown animals to hunt down and kill. There's two types, which I think might be some kind of meerkat and some antelope-type creature, too. The antelope-type ones are slightly smarter and more annoying to chase down. There's other animals around too, like wildebeast and zebra, but they're bigger than you, so if you try to pounce on them, you'll just get your face smashed in on their muscle mass. To further explain how the game's played, I should talk about the controls. The d-pad steers your cheetah, tapping B makes her run, a makes her pounce, Y puts on the breaks, and the shoulder buttons do a little sideways step.

 


The X button is a context-dependant button that only comes into play once you've killed one of your prey. If you're stood over the meat, X will eat a bit of it, replenishing your hunger meter. If you're not, it'll should for your kittens to come and eat, which is essential, as the aim of each stage is to fill their hunger meters before the time runs out. And when the hyena comes to steal your kill, X can be used to scare them off. So, you know the win condition, but there are several lose conditions. First, you can die from head trauma, as you lose health every time you run into something face first. Second, you can starve to death, as your own hunger meter depletes as you run around. Third, your kittens can starve to death, which works in the opposite way, as this happens if time runs out before you've filled all of their hunger meters. There's apparently lions who'll attack you from the fourth stage onwards, but I've been unable to confirm that.

 


Mechanically, the game is pretty fun. It's repetetive, but it's cute, and mildly satisfying. The problem comes in something that might be a programming error, or it might just be a bad design desicion, it's hard to tell. The stages are only a few screens across in each direction, and they also loop in each direction, too (meaning that these savannahs are all torus-shaped). But you can be running and running and running, and never finding any prey animals to kill. It's both boring and frustrating when this happens, seeing you hunger meter and the timer both running down, with nothing you can about it. Because of this, I've never seen past the second stage. I'd love to play more of this game, and I'd love to recommend it, but this one issue completely ruins it.

 


Now, the interesting thing about this is that it's a digital-only 3DS game that (I think) you can still obtain through official channels! Because it was made using Petit Computer 3/SmileBASIC, a program/programming language that was an officially-supported way of making homebrew for the 3DS (and the DSi before it, and the Switch after it). I believe that at the time of writing, if you already have Petit Computer 3 installed on your 3DS, you can still use the seven character codes to download people's work. If you're interested in Savannah Gurashi no Cheetah-san, the code for it is 2ZDQ83Z4.

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