It's Christmas, which means lots of togetherness, family, and opening the Amazon box and realizing it doesn't contain everything you ordered, so now you have to contact customer service and you know the crap isn't coming until January. The point is that I have always loved Christmas to an unhealthy extent. Although not the Christmas club in one battle after another, because, honey, they wouldn't like me for many reasons. Christmas is just such a fun, merry time, with its tragedies and hardships and parenting hell.
They say you can never go home and it's true. You can't. I burned down your house and built Raising Cane's over it. But I always wanted to recapture that childhood sense of magic. Not only the joy of giving beautiful gifts to someone you love or receiving weird gifts from someone you love, but apparently they don't know much about you other than “video game fan”. I'm just saying that I got a bunch of controller shaped novelties and none of them are really usable due to fluid physics.
where was i Oh, Christmas. Children's joy. That feeling of excitement and fear and worry and eagerness and hope that mom is too tired to make you go to Christmas Mass. So I've created a list of Christmas themed games that give me that feeling of childlike joy. Some new, some old, all go into my rotation as the best TV Christmas specials. But each one makes you feel like a kid running down the stairs before being yelled at to go back to sleep.
Parasite Eve
Parasite Eve takes place around the Christmas season. We know this because in the game's opening scenes we have a shot of a giant tree with an ornament that reads 'Merry Christmas 1997'. There's a big footprint. And then the bad lady uses mitochondria to set a bunch of people in nice clothes on fire at the opera house. This really becomes the main focus of the game, for better or for worse.
So why is Parasite Eve on the list? Because it's a horror RPG that takes place during Christmas. It features what every child dreams of: inheriting superpowers for Christmas. Forget video games or board games or board games based on video games.
And Christmas itself is a spooky holiday! The Victorians talked about ghosts around December 25th. There is magical creepiness everywhere. The city is empty! The zoo is empty! During the holidays, you have free access to the Natural History Museum. Heck, even the police station is empty. It's just you, a few other helpful cops, Manhattan, superpowers, and kicking out mutant monsters from God's birthday. No child would choose anything else.
Santa Claus in trouble HD
This is a remaster of an older game from the early 2000s. You may remember it. It's kind of a weird, semi-good 3D platformer where you collect gifts. It's not bad or broken by any means, but if you complete this game, you will effectively become the next Santa Claus. They changed the rules where you don't have to kill the last one like in the Tim Allen movie. That was based on real news, you know.
I have Santa Claus in Trouble HD on my list because it's exactly the kind of cheap, free games kids past and present play during the holidays. Most of you probably don't remember receiving holiday shareware gifts of hundreds of Christmas-themed games, all of which were really terrible knock-offs of more popular titles.
That's how I feel playing Santa Claus in Trouble HD. It's not an amazing game, or a great game, or a good game, but it's nostalgic. It's the kind of thing your parents shove in front of you to get you to shut up about Santa. Fortunately, moms and dads keep this tradition alive to this day.
Tetris effect
I don't even know if it's Christmas themed, but the stage of Tetris Effect where there are lots of glittery ornaments feels very December 25th to me. Either way, the first time I hit virtual reality I got chills, a line no grown-up should ever repeat.
Big Trouble In A Little Chimney
In fact, there are few roguelite games with Santa. Also, Vampire Survivors apparently sold a lot of indie developers on reverse bullet hells. The best way to make money in the video game industry is to copy a formula that is already so successful and just hope you have the Marvel license and the willingness to draw those superheroes as sexy as possible.
But Vampire Survivors is kind of the perfect Christmas game formula: you excitedly open presents and hope it's exactly what you want. And you know exactly what I mean. You are excited if it is the right weapon or armor. You are so disappointed with an item that doesn't fit your game at all. There is nothing more Christmas than the joy and sadness of opening presents. It could be a Nintendo 64. It could be socks. No one knows and for some reason the box is the same size.
Big Trouble In Little Chimney pulls off the formula the best, so it's the one that makes the list. It goes hard, but it's not hyper-violent for the sake of novelty. It's also clearly an indie game, but at least it doesn't look like it was rushed together overnight at a game programming bootcamp. It's fun and silly, and it's this side of waving that's fun without being too corny.
PowerWash simulator
As children, our parents made us spend whole days cleaning the house before Christmas. This was largely because Christmas was the only day that all my relatives came to our house. Most holidays were at Grandma's, but we took Christmas off – probably because my grandmother from Florida was Jewish and didn't have children in her house.
Oh man, we had to clean up. Windows. Floor. You would be on your knees scrubbing the metal track under the sliding door. We were little kids doing full repairs and cleaning holes in the walls. You name it, we cleaned it. We electrically cleaned it. We washed it. We washed it.
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In addition to being generally relaxing as a game, PowerWash Simulator has a level of Santa's Workshop that reminds me of being seven years old and trimming bushes with electric hedge trimmers that were almost as heavy as I was. There is a sick, unhealthy joy in the fact that once all this junk is cleared away, Christmas will be upon us.
I'm sure it's a little crazy to be nostalgic for deep cleaning because of the threat of judgmental aunts and uncles, but that was Christmas for me. Playing this game – and especially the season phase – is reminiscent of a simpler, more laborious time. Looking back, I'm not sure my parents did a damn thing to clean up.
The Sims
You can have Christmas in The Sims! You can get a Christmas tree! You can celebrate! You can invite friends and give them gifts in the hope that they will kiss you. As the series progressed, so did the number of official and unofficial ways to design the perfect Christmas home where the kids don't cry this time.
It goes without saying that recreating my childhood home and childhood Christmas is ultimately a psychologically self-destructive act. But it's the only way I can literally get home. I can improve it. Grandma Lori and Grandpa Shelly are back in the land of the living looking more bored than ever! Morbid thoughts aside, it's pretty cool to throw a Christmas party for my virtual friends. I bet it's pretty cool to go to a party.
Animal Crossing
Almost everything I wrote about The Sims applies to the GameCube version of Animal Crossing. Why the GameCube version? Because you can play real Nintendo games on it. In theory, you could pretend to be receiving the greatest gifts that 1985 had to offer. It doesn't matter that it's less convenient than any other emulated version. You receive a video game as a gift and the game contains Christmas iconography. Done.
Christmas NIGHTS into dreams
The little “i” in Christmas NIGHTS kills me. It's not important.
Christmas NIGHTS into Dreams was originally intended to be a fun little demo for the main game on the Sega Saturn. Instead, it became a holiday tradition. Which makes sense, because Christmas NIGHTS feels the closest I can imagine to sugar plums dancing in my head. Of all the games on this list, Christmas NIGHTS feels like it represents the purest magic of the holidays.
You might be playing the same basic game as NIGHTS, but with more Christmas stuff thrown in with a whole bunch of Easter eggs that can even change depending on whether you're playing the game near the holidays or during the holidays. It's sweet, it's charming, and it makes you wish more triple-A companies made more Christmas games. Or at least it makes me wish I did. You probably wished for better graphics or something.
Battle of the Gods
Oh yeah baby! It's time to make Santa Claus fight against Jesus Christ! Hell, Santa Claus takes down all the gods in Fight of Gods.
What is Fight of Gods? I'm glad you asked, even if you won't after finding out! As you've probably guessed by the power of context, Fight of Gods is a fighting game where you can play various religious characters. I was going to say 'gods' but Moses is there and he's not really a god. However, he likes to beat you with those stone tablets with the ten commandments!
Fight of Gods is not a good game. At all. It's a shovel. It's also a game I've put dozens of hours into and bought multiple times. Everything in Fight of Gods is so stupid. So ridiculous. And what's more ridiculous than a fighting game with Santa Claus? You can finally tell who it really is, even though Matt Stone and Trey Parker first did it decades ago.
Seriously, the Santa in this game is so stupid that it works. His hollow voiced one word “Merry Christmas” makes me laugh so hard. And that's what Christmas is about. He indulges in absurdities and nonsense. Allowing Saint Nicholas to beat up Anubis. Plus, Fight of Gods kind of captures the nostalgic feeling of you and your siblings beating the crap out of each other. Merry Christmas you nerds!
- Released
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September 16, 2002
- ESRB
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E
- Engine
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Havoc
