Back again for a very special Sunday roundup of quick-fire reviews and impressions of everything under the spotlight at Retro Arcadia this week, old and new and a bit of both… Well, some of these at least, because in what seems to have become an annual tradition, this week I’ve exclusively been playing some old Christmas games, so let’s get festive!

Special Delivery was my very first experience on the Commodore 64, which is probably why I got a Spectrum the following Christmas, although I reckon the boot might have been on the other foot had I tried that version first instead! The premise is the same – you’re Santa, flying about on your sleigh, catching the presents being dropped by angels while avoiding clouds that will take them back off you. Get enough and you need to land on a roof, climb down using the three ladders in the widest chimney ever while dodging flames coming up and rocks or something coming down, then tiptoe around a very magenta 2.5D house, admiring all the colour clash, dodging some baddies, and trying to drop off your presents under the Christmas tree, before finding a key to get out and start again! Like the C64 version, it’s hardly a system seller, but it’s very 1984, it plays just fine and it’s got plenty of variety. Hard as nails after the first delivery too!

We’ll head to the Amiga next, and an Amiga Format magazine cover-disk, no less! This was no ordinary demo though, it was Xmas Lemmings from December 1991, and it went down so well there was another the following year, before two full commercial releases in 1993 and 1994, which will keep me going here for the next few Christmas Specials! Obviously, it’s based on the ridiculously popular puzzler from DMA Design (better known as Rockstar North nowadays), where you’re trying to get dozens of idiot rodents from one end of the level to the other without killing themselves, using special abilities like block or dig or explode that you can assign to individual lemmings as they go. Absolute genius and still crazy addictive! This first Christmas version was actually created to promote the recent (at the time) sequel, Oh No! More Lemmings, and features two special Christmas levels before two regular levels from that, and they all play just as you’d expect, with a mouse click selecting an ability then another to select the lemming you want to give it to, who will then automatically get on with it at the earliest possibility. Fiendishly simply! It’s all very Christmassy, with lemmings in Santa suits, twinkling fairy lights and better snowmen that you could ever build for real, but if I’m being critical the backgrounds are a bit dour. Suppose you wouldn’t see what’s going on otherwise though, and the very well-crafted Christmas tunes playing along with you make up for it. And it’s free so what more do you want?!?!

There was a 1992 platform game called Santa’s Xmas Caper on the Amiga too, but I’m going for its Commodore 64 counterpart this time, where it actually began life, as a horizontally scrolling shoot ‘em up. Same developer for both, Zeppelin Games, with this one from a couple of years earlier, although you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s straight out of 1985 to look at – the most C64 Christmas game ever, with loads of brown and gloriously chunky sprites! Old-school difficult too… In fact, as we’re about to find out, I’m a bit of a bullet-hell shoot ‘em up connoisseur, but this is brutal beyond me! It starts out in Lapland, which is where it’s also likely to end, with pixies gone wild coming at you from everywhere, throwing lethal presents and decorations at you as you’re also bombarded by Christmas puddings and turkeys, then in theory you’re crossing the ocean before hitting the town where you’re delivering the presents you haven’t thrown back at them before a final boss – an angel holding two Christmas trees! It’s often a really good-looking game (including the title screen, which got reused for the Amiga game), and the music is sublime, but you’re sleigh is so big and the screen so cramped with all that stuff flying about, making it so tough… Which I can forgive because it is fair despite that, but what I won’t forgive the apostrophe at the bottom where it shows the number of “Santa’s” remaining!

I’ve tried to avoid any direct repeats from last year’s Weekly Spotlight Christmas Special (where there’s a load more of these games if you’re interested) but there’s no way I’m leaving my favourite genre with that bad taste in my mouth, and not take the opportunity to play the sequel to my all-time favourite shoot ‘em up, and the greatest Christmas game of them all, Deathsmiles II: Makai No Merry Christmas! It might not quite reach the same exhilarating heights as its predecessor, and its gothic exuberance is lost a bit in the move to bonkers festive polygons, but it’s still a 2009 bullet-hell from Cave, and that makes it pretty fantastic in all other respects! The evil Satan Claws killed your caretaker, Count Dior, on Christmas Eve, so you’ve got to chase him down through Gilverado’s winter wonderland, which adds new locations to the original game, and there’s two saucy new “Angels” to play as too. And it plays just great, with some insane bosses and a challenging but beatable difficulty curve. I guess I’d just like it to be a bit more consistently Christmassy at this time of year, which it kind of forgets about at times later on. Though I’d probably say the opposite at all other times of the year so let’s move on!

“Decapitation is a most ‘orrible crime…” I’m going totally off-piste now with Dracula Unleashed for the Mega-CD, or Sega-CD if you prefer, a 1993 interactive gothic horror movie and pioneer of using full-motion video as a key gameplay element, much like my old favourite Night Trap and the even more wonderful Sewer Shark, all three of which are in my big list of games to cover in their own deep-dives here at some point (which is actually why I was playing this)! It’s set ten years after Bram Stoker’s novel, with rich Texan Alexander Morris in London trying to uncover what happened to his brother Quincey, while on the other side of Europe, Dracula is being brought back to life in a strange ceremony, and using a spooky amulet is then going to be able to take any human form. You need to unmask him and kill him again before your time runs out, using a familiar point-and-click interface to find and piece together various clues while watching what must have been very impressive (and big budget) video for the time, which might struggle to impress today but the laughably bad acting is timeless! And a lot of the action takes place around Christmas, so if that’s good enough for Die Hard (more later!) then it’s good enough for me!

I’m going to finish on the SNES with Daze Before Christmas from Sunsoft in 1994, which was originally an Australian exclusive for the Mega Drive before it got this European and Australian port. Unsurprisingly, it’s a very festive platformer that sees you as Santa, trying to save Christmas after an evil mouse stole all the presents, which you need to recover across an advent calendar full of themed levels by using magic on enemies to turn them back into their original gift-wrapped form. It’s all very simple and unthreatening, although there is a cool touch where you can drink a cup of tea and turn into your evil twin, Anti-Claus, making you temporarily invincible but unable to use magic. The levels are occasionally separated by a sleigh-riding mini-game too, involving dropping presents down chimneys, which is a nice diversion but ultimately it’s all very cute and very easy and definitely aimed at the younger player, as you’d expect from such a Christmas game! By the way, that pic at the top of this page is the title screen from this one too, just before the logo drops onto it.

And with that, I think we’re about done here, but before I quickly tell you what’s on at Retro Arcadia over the festive period, if you want a bit of a deep-dive into another Christmas game – as well as my top ten Christmas movies – then have a look at Discovering Die Hard Trilogy on the original PlayStation from the week before last! And in case you missed it last Wednesday, do check out the annual Retro Arcadia Game of the Year and Top Ten Countdown 2023 too if you haven’t already! Then next Wednesday, it’s another annual feature, and a bit of a self-indulgent look into all the games I’ve completed over the past year, just to fill the gap while everyone else probably has better things to do! Then next Sunday, I’ll be back again for the regular Weekly Spotlight with not a Christmas game in sight before we get into New Year stuff which I’ll tell you all about then. In the meantime, have a very merry Christmas!