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.

Comments

You Don't Know Jack

[Myself]

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!"

Nights and Heavy Gear II

[jvmatthe]

Nights for the Sega Saturn had a special Xmas version that used the internal clock in the Saturn to release special items during Christmas. Sadly, it appears that GameFAQs doesn't have any information about it specifically, but you can read the FAQ by STowle on this page for Nights which has a description in an appendix.

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.

Everquest

[Osmosis_Garett]

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.

Arr....Puzzle Pirates

[Seraphim_72]

Snow on the isles and Poinsettias, gave me adrink of rum when I saws them ....garrrr...

The Incredible Machine

[denubis]

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.

Ultima Online...

[jermyjerm]

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?