It's Christmas, which means lots of fellowship, family, and opening a box from Amazon and realizing they didn't include everything you ordered so now you have to contact customer service and you know the crap won't arrive until January. The thing is, I've always loved Christmas to an unhealthy extent. Although not that Christmas club in one battle after another, because honey, they wouldn't like me for a lot of reasons. Christmas is just such a fun, happy time, even with its tragedies and hardships and parenting hell.
They say you can never go home again and it's true. You can't. I burned down your home and built a tall stick over it. But I've always wanted to recapture that childhood sense of magic. Not just the joy of giving beautiful gifts to someone you love or receiving weird gifts from someone you love but apparently doesn't know much about you other than “video game fan”. I'm just saying that I've gotten a lot of controller shaped mugs and not one of them is actually usable due to the physics of liquids.
Where was I? Oh, Christmas. The joy of childhood. That feeling of excitement and fear and worry and eagerness and hope that mom is too tired to make you go to Christmas fair. So I've created a list of Christmas themed games that bring out that sense of childhood joy in me. Some new, some old, all go into my rotation as the best Christmas TV specials. But every one of them will make you feel like a kid running down the stairs before you're called back to sleep.
Parasite Eve
Parasite Eve takes place around the Christmas season. We know this because in the opening scenes of the game we are shown a picture of a giant tree with an ornament that reads “Merry Christmas 1997”. Big clue there. And then the bad lady uses mitochondria to set fire to a bunch of people in fancy clothes at the opera. It really becomes the bigger focus of the game, for better or for worse.
So why is Parasite Eve on the list then? Because it's a horror RPG set during Christmas. It contains what every child dreams of: inheriting superpowers for Christmas. Forget getting video games or board games or board games based on video games.
And Christmas itself is a scary holiday! The Victorians used to tell ghost stories around December 25th. There is a magical ghostliness everywhere. The city is empty! The zoo is empty! With the holiday you have free access to the Museum of Natural History. Hell, even the police station is empty. It's just you, some helpful fellow cops, Manhattan, superpowers, and blasting mutant monsters from God's Birthday. No child would choose otherwise.
Santa Claus in Trouble HD
This is a remaster of an older game from the early 2000s. Maybe you remember it. It's a slightly weird, half-baked 3D platformer where you collect presents. It's not bad or broken by any means, but if you finish this game, you will actually 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. It was based on real reporting, you know.
I have Santa Claus in Trouble HD on the list because it's exactly the kind of cheap, free game that kids past and present play around the holidays. Most of you probably don't remember getting shareware Christmas presents with hundreds of Christmas themed games, all of which were really terrible ripoffs of more popular titles.
That's how I feel playing Santa in Trouble HD. It's not a great game, or a great game, or a great game, but it's nostalgic. It's the kind of thing your parents shoot in front of you to shut up Santa. Thankfully, moms and dads have kept that tradition alive to this day.
Tetris effect
I don't even know if it's Christmas themed, but that Tetris Effect stage where there's a bunch of flashing baubles feels pretty December 25th-y. Anyway, it gave me chills the first time it hit virtual reality, a sentence that should never be repeated by an adult.
Big problem in the little chimney
There are actually few roguelite games with Santa. Also, Vampire Survivors has clearly sold many indie developers on reverse bullet hell. The best way to make money in the video game industry is to copy a formula that is already super successful and just hope you have a Marvel license and are willing to draw these superheroes as sexy as possible.
But Vampire Survivors is kind of a perfect Christmas game formula: you eagerly open presents and hope it's exactly what you want. And you know exactly what I mean. You are happy if it is the right weapon or armor. You're so disappointed with an item that doesn't fit into your playthrough 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 best, so it makes the list. It goes hard, but it's not hyper-violent for the sake of novelty. It's also clearly an independent game, but at least it doesn't look like it was quickly thrown together overnight in a game programming bootcamp. It's fun and silly and just this side of tongue in cheek being fun without being too corny.
PowerWash Simulator
As children, our parents forced us to spend days cleaning the house before Christmas. This was largely due to the fact that Christmas was the only day when all my relatives came to our house. Most holidays were at my grandmother's, but we took Christmas off – probably because my grandmother in Florida was Jewish and didn't have children in her house.
Oh, we had to clean up. Windows. The floor. You would get on your knees and scrub the metal track under a sliding door. We were little kids doing full repairs and puttying holes in walls. You name it, we cleaned it. We cleaned it. We washed it. We the power washed it.
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Besides being comforting as a game in general, PowerWash Simulator has a Santa's Workshop level that reminds me of being seven years old and cutting the bushes with electric hedge trimmers that were almost as heavy as I was. There's a sick, unhealthy joy in knowing that when all this junk is cleaned up, it's Christmas.
I'm sure it's a little crazy to be nostalgic for a deep clean because of the threat of judgmental aunts and uncles, but it was Christmas for me. Playing this game – and especially the seasonal stages – is reminiscent of the simpler, more labor intensive time. Looking back, I'm not sure my parents did a damn thing to clean.
The Sims
You can have Christmas in The Sims! You can get a Christmas tree! You can celebrate! You can invite friends over and give them gifts in hopes of making them want to kiss you. As the series has progressed, so have 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 go home again. I can do better. Grandma Lori and Grandpa Shelly are back in the land of the living looking more bored than ever! Sick thoughts aside, having a Christmas party for my virtual friends is pretty cool. It's pretty cool to get to go to any party, I bet.
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. Theoretically, you can pretend you're receiving the greatest gifts 1985 had to offer. The fact that it's less convenient than any other emulated version doesn't matter. You get a video game as a gift and the game has July iconography. Done.
Christmas nights into dreams
That lowercase “i” in Christmas Nights is going to kill me. 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 feel the closest thing I can imagine to the sugar plum 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 base game as NiGHTS but with more Christmas stuff sprinkled with a whole bunch of easter eggs that can even change depending on whether you're playing the game near or on a holiday. It's cute, it's charming, and it makes you wish more triple-A companies produced more Christmas games. Or at least it makes me want to. You probably wanted better graphics or something.
God's fight
Oh, yes, darling! Time to get Santa to fight Jesus Christ! Hell, Santa takes down all the gods in Fight of Gods.
What is Fight of Gods? I'm glad you asked, even if you won't be after you find out! As you've probably guessed by the force of context, Fight of Gods is a fighting game where you can play various religious figures. I was going to say “gods” but Moses is in there and he really isn't a god. But he loves to hit you with those Ten Commandments in stone!
Fight of Gods is not a good game. At all. It's spade. It's also a game I've spent tens of hours on and bought more than once. Everything in Fight of Gods is just so stupid. So ridiculous. And what's more ridiculous than a fight with Santa Claus? You can finally decide who the holiday is really about, even if Matt Stone and Trey Parker only did it decades ago.
Seriously, the plot of this game is so stupid it works. His hollow voices, single-take “Merry Christmas” makes me laugh so much. That's what Christmas is all about, too. Revels in the absurd and the nonsense. Allows Saint Nicholas to beat Anubis. Plus, Fight of Gods captures that 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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Havok
