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Special Christmas Features In Games?
An anonymous reader writes "Some online and offline videogames make special changes for the holiday season. There's the Planetside Christmas decorations, where Sony has embedded the holidays into their futuristic online war, and also a Christmas mutator for Unreal Tournament 2003. What other holiday changes are people seeing in their gaming today?" Phantasy Star Online has also instituted some neat changes for Xmas.
The YDKJ series includes special features for all sorts of holidays and anniversaries. It also checks the system clock, and will greet you with things like "weeeeelcome to the insomniac edition of you don't know jack!"
Finally, Heavy Gear II apparently has little red-and-white Santa hats on the Gears on Christmas day. I don't know for sure if this works in all versions, but I know it did in the Linux one.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Everquest used to give all players gnomish fireworks for Christmas, completely saturating the market there with these useless items. Of course, since they're useless, there really was no market for them in the first place. Christmas brought about the only time that Gnomes could really sell those items. I also remember a few oversized Trolls or Ogres handing out presents to newbies... to be honest, Everquest always seemed to have the most Christmas spirit in any of the MMO games I've played (and I've played most).
At this point, I dont see any reason why a massively multiplayer world wouldn't give their user base a christmas gift, unless the dev team is made up of Grinches.
I dont know if MMO games really qualify within this topic. I am sure that games like 'Animal Crossing' would have time sensitive items to unlock. I seem to remember Black and White having a Christmas 'easteregg', and possibly Warcraft2, but someone will have to verify those. Considering the small amount of code required to add features like these to games, the only thing that would keep the developers from adding them is the risk of 'feature creep'; IMHO it would be a better world if features like these were the norm.
Snow on the isles and Poinsettias, gave me adrink of rum when I saws them ....garrrr...
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Puzzle Pirates covered all the islands in snow and holiday decorations. It's not very impressive looking, but it obviously took a lot of work. Yarrrr
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Not exactly in game, but amusing none-the-less. Blizzard has a couple of MP3s with a Christmas theme. The 12 Days O Xmas features StarCraft units in a parody of the classic song. Nasty Diablo is a parody of Frosty the Snowman. Both are hilarious!
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
ADOM gives your character some bonus or the other. I think the game also started with "you follow a star to the valley..."
Dark Castle would display a Christmas tree in the corner of the room if the date was Dec. 25...
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Galaxies gave away "Wookie Life Day Orbs" for Wookie Life Day in City Halls (I'm mayor of Apollyon, Lok on Corbantis server) to give to citizens. Aside from that, we get a 7 day "buddy key" to let friends try Galaxies, and also everyoen got one or two free Jedi Holocrons.
the Political Inquirer
The game usually starts with Homer taking a nap in the living room, on 12.25, he changes his cloths to something like Santa's, and there is an xmas tree in the room.
The gameplay is the same though, but I think it's a nice touch.
The IT section color scheme sucks.
In Dungeon Keeper, a message is displayed everytime some of the developers has birthday, and so on. Maybe it also happends when it's christmas, I haven't tried.
My favorite feature of Spaceword Ho! was on christmas all the planets turned into little santa heads..
Set 12/25 and you will get a Christmas theme in Rise of the Triad game. There are other Easter eggs for other holidays too!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Then again, seasonal events and holidays are the entire point of the game.
Speaking of which, that reminds me: maybe I should visit my town to see what I got for Christmas. Though the downside will be the fact that the damned bitchy rooster will call me out for not visiting for almost a year. Man, my neighbours are going to be pissed.
The really old game The Incredible Machine (and the other expansion packs/versions) would give you holday themed objects.
AFAIK, they had a christmas tree, a halloween jack-o-lantern, and a thanksgiving turkey.
That was a great game.
Counter-Strike does not have any time sensitive features (far as I know), but there's a map called X-mas Dust floating around in the web (someone, please, give the credit where it's due, I don't know the origin of this map). It is the standard Dust map, but there are snowmen, xmas presents and santas scattered about in the map. Also, there are xmas lights that lit up when a character passes them.
neither object had any value though. just for looks
But Natural Selection HL mod is supposed to go to version 3.0 sometime today!
That means the christmas feature is that alien and marine individuals can now duke it out in deathmatch instead of on teams!
Cover your eyes and click this link!
- Uniball (uniball-central.com) is down over the holidays, how great of a gift is that for your players! Also-Health Clubs are closed -- HOW THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO STAY AT 4% BODY FAT!!!!! ;)
Cover your eyes and click this link!
FFXI has had moogles giving out fireworks and trees decorated in towns ever since the patch on the 18th. They also have some performing NPCs breathing fire and juggling knives, but I'm not sure if that's holiday related.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
On the Danger Hiptop (T-Mobile Sidekick), there is an easter egg game called "snowbored". Inside this game is a meta easter egg - the trees turn into Christmas trees in the month of December.
Beyond Dark Castle had a christmas tree and stolkings around the fireplace when you went in the game on dec 25.
You can't take the sky from me...
But a few people running Team Fortress servers have set up christmas versions of the 2fort map.
One will randomly turn grenades into christmas presents.
The other is freaky with a sky that looks like pollen scanned with an electron microscope, and the levels are dotted with what appears to be survey equipment, christmas trees, and costumes that you can put on like Santa, a Snowman, one of the aliens form Half Life, and Homer Simpson. And the costumes say freaky things or play music. Oh and each fort has a "One Ring" which you can touch to turn invisible.
Many of the zones in Subspace are sporting all kinds of various graphical holiday cheer. Alpha zone ships are launching snowballs instead of bombs (beware the yellow snowballs) and Chaos zone was spotted with deadly ornaments flying everywhere and delivery cheerful gifts of doom.
Animal Crossing has some sort of Christmas event. In fact it has an event for quite a few holidays - Halloween, Thanksgiving? New years, etc.
Like you said, in Black and White the advisors say Christmasy things on Christmas.
http://noctalis.com/dis/bw/eggs7.shtml
Yeah, but it's not like the games are throwing Christmas decorations at you every day from Thanksgiving, just Christmassy orientation on Christmas day itself. If you find that sad, gotta say, that's a bit of the grinch.
The good folks at Turbine never failed to fill Asheron's Call with all sorts of treats every holiday season. I remember one year every character in the game was given a little toy monster (a scaled down version of the more famous monsters in the game). I think there were something close to a dozen different types, and people traded to try and get full sets and what not. All the toys would go through cute little animations when placed on the ground, and all had delightful names... I still miss my little pet Tusker.
"Who wants a 'nanner? Tusker want a 'nanner?"
Aside from free gifts, UO had the best holiday bonus ever in the form of a Christmas PvP server. The entire game world in that server was covered in snow and all trees were decorated with "lights," etc, but the best part was that characters spawned looking like either Santa or an Elf. Everyone had max stats to even the playing field, and only basic weapons and bandages to use.
It was basically a massive deathmatch... pure hilarious pandemonium.
I also seem to remember killer reindeer running around, but I'm kinda groggy from holiday face-stuffing, so I could be wrong.
Was anyone else a part of this insane experience?
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Planetside players have been running around with santa hats in the days leading up to Christmas.
The game intro screen changes (homer as santa, tree in the corner)
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
In Tyrian, On christmas day, you get a prompt about whether you want christmas mode - it's just another funky mode, this time you get christmas decorations. (Look up the other modes on cheating sites).
Also, in black and white, if I remember right (it may have been another day, I'm not sure), your creature's footprints become smiley faces.
I remember getting this for Christmas and seeing a Santa in the hangar waving like mad. Pretty cool. ;)
Oh, and the new Simpsons Road Rage game supposedly changes the menu screen, or so I've heard.
In Ready 2 Rumble II (Dreamcast, PS2), if your console's date is set to 12/25, you will have additional characters/outfits to choose from, including Snowman and Elf.
Is it worth owning one of these devices? Sorry about the offtopic, but I'm trying to decide if it's worth getting one to replace my crappy cell phone.
...had (have?) Christmas content. The one I remember the most was Christmas of '99, in Sonic Adventure, where the main town square was snow-covered, with a Christmas tree in the middle, IIRC. I'm not sure if they are still doing this, but I'd imagine the GC re-release of Sonic Adventure DX would have it, too.
In dec 25 all the turtles have santa hats.. is one of the few games in which the character actually changes its looks. =)
ot:they also have the award to: best way to screw up a modern videogame fast!
*Limited lives and continues.
*You ALWAYS have to start from the beginning when you reset the console (you cant save)
*The game can be played by tapping a single button about 1 billion times.
If there was a post before this one that mentioned the Simpsons Hit & Run (and there is, I checked) why not MOD IT UP YOU RETARDS?!?
Now we have to posts below the +2 threshold that most of us will miss and there's a good chance a third person will come along and post about the same damn thing...
Oh look, SOMEONE DID!!!
There was an old, old startup program for the original Macs that gave a greeting based on the date and/or time ("Welcome to Macintosh, but you should be in bed"). It was fully customizable with a text file, and used MacInTalk (or whatever the text-to-speech software was). I still have an old MacPlus startup diskette with a cool startup screen, plays a bit of Money For Nothing, then runs the greeting program.
There was also a game called "The Colony" which had a standard decoration throughout of old dried-up sticks in tubs. On Christmas, they turned into Christmas trees. That was a great game, by the way, I'd love to see it on something other than a MacPlus (even running on a Mac II the enemies ran too fast, no real-time based motion). There was supposed to be a color version coming out, I sent in my $5, but never heard of it again.
Someone already mentione Hit & Run, but Simpson's Road Rage also gives you a special car/driver - got it for Christmas, and there's a Christmas Apu. Probably other dates, but haven't checked.
Screencap from Fuel Dump posted at Planetwolfenstein.
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