Learning Game Design with Arcade Berg

Christmas games

Home Alone with Macaulay Culkin, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase or Jingle All the Way with Termi..Erm... Arnold Schwarzenegger.

There are many christmas movies and many of them have followers that even though the movies aren't great, they watch them every year during the holidays. It becomes a tradition and that particular movie gives you that jolly christmas feeling.

Bet you don't have a particular christmas game? It's too bad really but most people doesn't, including me.

Christmas movies are most often low- to mid-budget production but they still make it work, riding on the christmas theme. Movies, in comparison to games are often more able to stand against time. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is 20 years old next year, yet it's still running on TV right now. I'm watching it while writing this. It's not great, heck it might even be too much to say it's even good if you ask me, but it still works somehow.

I'd love to see some enjoyable christmas games! More than indie and flash-games. I mean smaller professional games; maybe for the XBLA, PSN or Steam.

Right now, I can only think of one real christmas game: James Pod 2: Codename RoboCod for the Amiga (and some other formats) by Millennium Interactive. I remember playing this every now and then for the Amiga 500, enjoying every minute of it!

James Pond is a walking fish with body armour, who is in a battle with his adversary Dr. Maybe. Dr. Maybe has captured lots of penguins as well as toys. Given the code name RoboCod (a pun on RoboCop), the remaining penguins send James on a mission to rescue the other penguins, retrieve the toys and defeat Dr. Maybe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Pond_2, available 23/12-08

You're in Santa's toy factory and the final boss is Frosty. I mean, that's just pure awesomeness!

Pick these up in the correct order and you get something special. I'm not kidding.

Frosty!

I want christmas games for christmas! And I want those games to be able to stand time, so I can play them every year.

It's now 45 minutes to Christmas Eve here in Sweden, so I wish you all a Merry Chstimas!

Edit 24/12-08: Haha, shortly after I posted this I realized; I'm not watching Christmas Vacation at all! It was National Lampoon's Vegas Vacation that was running on TV! The Christmas one is tomorrow. Sorry!