What have you been playing this holiday season? Don't answer that, I can't hear you. C'mon, sharpen up kid. The problem is, I bet I can't guess. Maybe you've been catching up on a big game from this year, like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3 or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom. Maybe you've been on one of the recent trio of GOTY noms in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Alan Wake 2, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man 2, or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario Bros. Wonder. Maybe you've been rattling through some of this year's great indies that I've linked here, since there's far too many to list. Maybe it's another game altogether, an old favourite, or something from the backlog. But shouldn't it be something Christmassy?
The problem is, there's not a lot to choose from. I have loudly and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:repeatedly hailed 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man: Miles Morales as the perfect Christmas game, but it's more a game at Christmas than it is a game about Christmas. I appreciate these can still be heavily linked to the holidays - Die Hard and Little Women are two of my favourite Christmas movies, and both fall into the At camp rather than the About camp. But movies have soldiers in the About army, and gaming has nought but an empty battlefield.
Some games get close to being Christmas classics, but there's no standout
There are other examples besides Miles Morales to scratch that itch. Batman: Arkham Origins, Bully, and Parasite Eve, along with Miles himself, ensure there are examples dating back through every console era to the PS1. Live-service games have 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:seasonal events themed after Christmas, and everything from Spyro to Skyrim has some winter wonderlands waiting to be discovered. There is a Christmas spirit waiting to be found in gaming, but you will need to seek it out, and it's a shame we don't have a holiday classic all of our own. But with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Game Pass, that could change in the future.
Everyone knows the holiday season starts as soon as you play All I Want For Christmas by Mariah Carey, and there are thousands of different Christmas songs. This year has been a huge breakout for Sabrina Carpenter, following up her Emails I Can't Send album with a deluxe edition that seemed to finally launch her into stardom, along with her own full tour, new singles, and the rather significant booking of opening for Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour. And still, in this busiest of years, she has a Christmas album out - one I'm listening to right now. This album was recorded this year amongst all her other engagements, and it was still on shelves by mid-November.
While gaming is short of Christmas games, it doesn't lack for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Christmas gifts.
Likewise, starting a few weeks ago and running until January, various shows will be airing Christmas specials that were filmed months ago. Cinemas and streaming sites have a wide range of holiday offerings too, starting with Thanksgiving and running through with Silent Night, The Holdovers, Family Switch, Dashing Through the Snow, and It's a Wonderful Knife. There's quite a range in there - Dashing Through the Snow boasts a lowly 5.4 on IMDb, while The Holdovers is expected to challenge for Oscars. All of these were made with the express purpose to release at Christmas time for the holidays.
This is where gaming's huge scope is its own worst enemy. Video games simply cannot stick to a release date. They take too long and they're too complicated to predict. So if you're making a game of any significant size, you can't bank on releasing it mid-November to early-December to cash in on the Christmas season. The biggest game in that window this year was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and that☂ was delayed several times over, missing its intended target of releasing alongside Avatar: The Way of Water by a year.
There's also the fact it costs just the price of a Spotify subscription to listen to 'brina and her holiday tunes, or a cinema ticket/streaming subscription for any of those movies. With a Christmas video game, you need people to shell out and buy it right before Christmas, and then play it immediately to get the impact. While Avatar is the only game in that window this year, we had that aforementioned GOTY trio just a few weeks before.
Miles Morales is the closest we'll get to it, because it was always aiming for the PS5 launch. That comes in at under 15 hours even if you do absolutely everything, so it's not exactly a behemoth of a game. But then, maybe that's the solution. A small but polished game that doesn't break the bank sounds like the perfect Xbox Game Pass to me. Add in that Xbox has long tried to market itself as fun for the whole family, and the mass amounts of studios it owns, and we could have all the ingredients for a holiday classic. Ebenezer and The Invisible World, though less popular than Miles, has also proved that a Christmas game can and does work.
I have no idea what the future holds for Xbox. It is surely at the end of its acquisition phase and now needs results. Arkane's and Bethesda's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:first attempts for the green team were 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:rated as their worst yet, and while it wasn't involved in Modern Warfare 3, the first CoD game post-Activision buyout 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:was also a stinker. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Halo: Infinite stuttered. All eyes are on Fable. Xbox needs some big games in the new year,ﷺ and it could do wor🔯se than aiming for a holiday classic.
