This is the twenty-eighth entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,149,829.66 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Our next random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality is [HammerA] HammerTime !, by K.hermann. Its tagline in the bundle reads:

[HammerA] HammerTime ! is an short interactive 2d anime game !

Very well, K.hermann. I will interact with your short 2d anime game.

[HammerA] HammerTime ! runs in Flash, with both a .swf and an .exe executable offered for download. The .exe ran fine for me without any fiddling. It defaults to a small window, which I could enlarge with the generic Windows maximize function, but which would not run in “native” fullscreen. Upon starting the game, I was greeted with a title screen explaining a few basic controls. In the top left, T and H symbols occasionally lit up. If I tapped the T and H keys on my keyboard in time with the prompts, I was rewarded with a nice clanging sound and some increasing numbers, eventually unlocking more complicated patterns. Embarrassingly, I thought that this was the game, or that I had to progress through it to get to the real game. Eventually I realized that the title screen said “Enter = Start Game” right there in plain sight. Tapping the keys on the title screen is just an additional, optional minigame.

But the full game is barely more involved. Pressing Enter starts the short anime, showing a woman with a huge hammer running towards the camera, chasing down what appears to be a giant, sentient nail sporting an evil grin. At a few key points, the woman attempts to hammer the nail, and an on-screen prompt to press either T or H appears (why T and H? I can only assume they stand for HammerTime). Tap correctly, and quickly enough, and the anime proceeds. But the entire anime is less than a minute long before it loops, and after running through it twice players will have “completed” the game, unlocking the gallery mode as a reward. This shows some concept art with different versions of the woman and her hammer.

That’s it. The only way players interact with [HammerA] HammerTime ! is through these quick time events, which can be annoying for those with poor reflexes. Mistakes mean restarting the animation again. On the other hand, the animation is kind of cool, with some fancy blurring effects and perspective tricks, and it’s so short that players should have little trouble getting through it all even if they miss a lot of prompts at first.

[HammerA] HammerTime ! is a bit of an oddity, then. If you own the bundle, it will literally only take a few minutes to check it out. So if you want to behold the epic battle between the hammer-toting woman and the giant evil nail, why not try it? if you missed the bundle, however, [HammerA] HammerTime ! is sold for a minimum price of 1.11€. That’s not a lot, but I must stress that it really is very short. On the itch.io page, K.hermann says that the game is inspired by Mega CD games. I never owned a Mega CD, but I think I played a crappy FMV game on one at a friend’s house as a kid, and it was a similar style of hitting prompts at the right time to continue and see more of the movie. Players who have nostalgia for those titles may be interested to try [HammerA] HammerTime !, but others may want to skip it.

That’s 28 down, and only 1713 to go!