YMMV / Rock Star Ate My Hamster

• Harsher in Hindsight: The cheapest musician in the game (representing his lack of demand and quality) is "Sidney Sparkle", a parody of Gary Glitter, whose wages are £50 a week. This is somewhat prescient, but potentially overstates Glitter's popularity and value as an entertainer after his exposure as a consumer of child pornography and predatory sex offender in the 1990s.
• Nintendo Hard: "Unforgiving" is a fair description of this game's difficulty, as it is based around extremely difficult win conditions and an extremely angry random number generator. To wit:
  • You start off with £50,000. Good musicians cost around £15,000 a week and rising, with the most expensive costing £30,000, and you have to pay for good gear upfront out of this £50,000. You can go for the cheapest possible musicians and the cheapest possible instruments, but you will literally never be able to win because your band will be of such poor quality.
  • Your first week will inevitably have to be spent practicing for your band to go anywhere. You won't be able to make money otherwise, but you also won't make any money practicing, and in the meantime your band still wants to get paid.
  • Because of the above two facts, it is extremely possible to go bankrupt within a month. If not a week. It is as such functionally impossible to pair the best musician ("Bill Collins") with someone else because of this.
  • You can never change your band's lineup or appoint new musicians. If you've started off with "Dorrissey" and "Sidney Sparkle" to save money, you could be rolling in money but not be able to ever win because your band is so poor quality-wise that it never hits the charts.
  • Any money you earn is disregarded. The only metric for success is getting four gold records. The means of getting gold records is by going up the charts, which may be impossible (see above) and is decided entirely by an extremely unforgiving random number generator.
  • You are given no metrics or other information to decode whether your band is doing well or not. You'll hear them in practice getting (hopefully) slowly better, a sales graph without any numbers is shown in the bottom right of the screen and you can stage a gig and see how many people turn up, but that's it. This is borderline unforgivable given how much of the gameplay hinges on an unseen "popularity" score.
  • You need to stage publicity stunts in order to raise money. Any publicity stunt can, at random, permanently kill one of your band members, immediately costing you a heap of popularity and therefore earning potential and sales. This too makes the very best musician completely impossible to play as your sole band member, as you won't be able to afford the wages for both him and someone else and he could die at any moment and give you a game over.
  • Every so often you get a call asking you if you want to do a charity gig. The charity is decided at random after you say yes or no, with no indication beforehand as to whether you're agreeing to do a gig for "Deaf Aid" (good!) or "The Nuke Your Granny Foundation" (bad!). Choosing "wrongly" based on this immediately slaps your popularity down hard, whereas choosing the correct option gives you very little of a boost.
  • You get sponsored by a company for a fair amount of money upfront! Inevitably, the company's products are defective or dangerous in some way, and you lose lots of popularity. If you refuse the offers, they keep coming until you accept.
  • Your "stars" are very divaish and unless you shower them with gifts (on top of their massive wages) they are liable to quit the band at a moment's notice if you don't indulge them in some ridiculous (and very expensive) whim right before a show. As mentioned, you can never replace them.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The character roster is rife with this, with acts like Maradonna, Bill Collins and Tina Turnoff.

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