A Very Gaming Christmas Day 3 December 24, 2010

Christmas is just a day away, one of the biggest gaming holidays of the year.  It’s the day a lot of us remember when we’d get the newest consoles, games, and others.  But Christmas has become more than that.  Christmas is also about those great Holiday Specials we remember watching on TV.  But while most people’s holiday tradition is to watch something along the lines of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” or “How The Grinch Stole Christmas”, while I enjoy that, there are some other more modern Christmas Specials that have become a personal tradition for me.

As I’m sure many of your families do, my family used to have a tradition where we’d spend at least some of Christmas Eve shopping at a mall.  In all honesty though, most of our major gifts by this point would already be purchased, and this was mostly just to spend some time as a family while getting some minor stocking stuffers.  I remember enjoying it because I’d get to take a last minute look at some of the gifts I had been hoping for for Christmas before getting them the very next day.  Because of the overpopulation of parking and hassle of crowds, we don’t really do that any more, but if there was one Christmas special that reminded me the most of it, it was Scott Kurtz’s PVP Christmas Special.

Scott Kurtz was the very first person to start an online webcomic with PVP.  In it, he detailed the triumphs and tribulations of the people who worked at a popular gaming magazine.  In a epic 29-page story, the PVP team goes to a mall for some last minute shopping.  Each character has their own reasons for going, and one wants nothing to do with Christmas at all.  There were a lot of funny bits in the story that have always charmed me.  Kurtz was clearly influenced by the same Christmas Specials I had been, and decided to make this story a Christmas Special of his own, while still paying respect to those same specials.  You can see that in the first page, where one of the frames has a retro special logo in it when the comic officially starts.  Other great moments include hearing that the office troll was convinced Santa Claus is actually Superman came years before General Zod would come to the same conclusion.

In 2007, Kurtz started animating his comic strips into a paid series.  The last three episodes of the series was an updated version of this story.  I will not include the movie, as he charged for the series, but if you’re interested, you can probably still buy the series off his website or Xbox Live.

Well, thank you for sharing some of my Holiday Traditions with me this week.  Happy Holidays everyone!

A Very Gaming Christmas Day 2 December 23, 2010

Christmas is just days away, one of the biggest gaming holidays of the year.  It’s the day a lot of us remember when we’d get the newest consoles, games, and others.  But Christmas has become more than that.  Christmas is also about those great Holiday Specials we remember watching on TV.  But while most people’s holiday tradition is to watch something along the lines of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” or “How The Grinch Stole Christmas”, while I enjoy that, there are some other more modern Christmas Specials that have become a personal tradition for me.

There is probably no more famous a Christmas story than A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  The premise is simply universal.  A wealthy businessman who doesn’t believe in spending money, paying his workers a livable wage, paying taxes, or contributing to charity, obviously doesn’t think too much of the Christmas season.  Seriously?  Has this changed?  His underpaid worker who he treats badly has a family he needs to raise as best as he can, as well as a son who has a life threatening condition.  On Christmas Eve, he is visited in the night by several ghosts who show him his past, the present, and what his future will become.  At the end of it, he realizes he has the power to become a better person and make the lives of the people around him better.  The joy he gets from doing this is greater than all his money could give him.

This book has been retold dozens of times throughout the years.  There have been many film versions of the book, including a version starring Patrick Stewart, or one of the more famous starring George C. Scott and David Warner .  There have even been updated versions of the book as a movie, starring Bill Murray.  Heck, one of my favorites as a child was “Mickey’s Christmas Carol”, which casted all the characters with iconic Disney characters.  It was the last time many of the original voice actors would provide their voices.

Ten Christmases ago, Penny-Arcade made their own retelling of A Christmas Carol, with their own characters in the roles, and while the original character was a businessman, this character was a game developer.  This was my first exposure to Penny-Arcade, and I think it would probably be another two years before I started reading their site regularly.  The original comic was written in seven pages.  A new one was released each day leading up to Christmas, with a special two page ending which was released on Christmas Day.

So enjoy, Penny-Arcade’s Christmas Carol.

With each day, leading up to Christmas Eve, I hope you all enjoy another yearly gaming related Christmas tradition!  Happy Holidays.

A Very Gaming Christmas December 22, 2010

Christmas is just days away, one of the biggest gaming holidays of the year.  It’s the day a lot of us remember when we’d get the newest consoles, games, and others.  But Christmas has become more than that.  Christmas is also about those great Holiday Specials we remember watching on TV.  But while most people’s holiday tradition is to watch something along the lines of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” or “How The Grinch Stole Christmas”, while I enjoy that, there are some other more modern Christmas Specials that have become a personal tradition for me.

Surprisingly, a lot of what became canonical to the modern-day Santa Claus (who also goes by names in other countries as Father Christmas (translation) or simply St. Nicholas) were not biblical stories but stories that came from Christmas movies made within the last sixty years.  The actual appearance which cemented his legacy as a holiday figure, and which all Christmas Specials have been based upon, was the poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” which is more well-known by the first line of the poem, “Twas the Night Before Christmas”.  Once that was published, the canon was pretty much established.  His appearance, the names of the reindeer, how he operated, everything.  Since then many Christmas Specials and movies have expanded upon that canon, adding things like his history and how he got married, the possibility of him having successors, an entirely new reindeer, things like that.

So with that all said, please enjoy my favorite Christmas Special tradition, from PBC-Productions.  It’s Christmas Eve, and Santa has been kidnapped and trapped inside a terrible video game by a malevolent force.  Only Videoland’s one and true defender can save him, but unfortunately he has no knowledge of the terrible game Santa’s trapped in.  Fortunatly, a second hero, without powers, but with full knowledge and experience of terrible games has also been trapped inside the same game.  To survive and save Christmas, these two unlikely heroes must work together to rescue Santa Claus and free themselves from the game.

With each day, leading up to Christmas Eve, I hope you all enjoy another yearly gaming related Christmas tradition!  Happy Holidays.