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Merry Christmas from Game and Player on Game and Player

Merry Christmas from Game and Player

The Editors  //  December 25, 2009


Looking back at gaming and Yuletide.

F

or most of us, not a year has gone by without a flickering monitor and tightly held controller within sight of the light-bedecked, gift-wreathed, star-topped evergreen tree. A few of Game and Player's editors and contributors pluck a few recollections from seasons past.


Ed Kirchgessner

The year was 1993: I was disheveled, feverish and chilled with little to warm me but the spirit of the holidays and a 33Mhz 386 processor. Lucky for me, Santa came through that year, depositing a copy of Flashback under my family's Christmas tree. Sure, that bout with the flu forced me to miss a lot of fun with friends, but the fifteen hours or so that I spent playing Delphine's latest did a great deal to take my mind off things. Fine-tuned controls and bleeding-edge graphics made Flashback seem like the freshest game around. 2D visuals be damned: that was one mighty fine Christmas.


Alexandr Beran

My older brother sucks at Soul Calibur, but every Christmas Eve he challenges me. We play Soul Calibur 2 on my mother's Gamecube, and every fan's least favorite character Necrid is who he runs his button-mashing marathon with. Soul Calibur is a dance and the rhythm gets robbed from me when a foe never performs varied attacks or combos. Back in arcades he would have been shunned! The Golfland Street Fighter 2 machine I played got a bullet in the monitor when an armed player was treated to similar abuse. That's why I always keep the safety on during the holidays.


Jarred White

Several years ago, I found myself on that plane of existence somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. It was my second or third Christmas away from home, and I was feeling too cynical to bother going home for Christmas with the family. After more than a dozen Christmases with the family, I thought it would be nice to enjoy an uneventful holiday at home alone. Back then, I was still chain smoking cigarettes like Dale Gribble and learning to appreciate the finer things in life — like whiskey. Instead of going home, I barricaded myself in the house with my dogs, plenty of sundries, and Final Fantasy II for SNES. It had been years since I enjoyed the console classic, and I relished every pixelated moment of my shut-in activity that week. You might think that spending a Christmas more or less alone, comforted only by booze, nicotine and classic RPG action sounds depressing, but it was one of the best getaways I ever had.


Jeremy Steeves

Though I wasn't quite fortunate enough to have picked up an Xbox upon its launch in 2001, a friend of mine was, and on the snowy Christmas Eve a little over a month after the console had launched, I trekked over to his house and was exposed to the world of Halo: Combat Evolved. Working our way through the campaign took us late into the night and when we couldn't finish before I had to return home for bed, I wasn't sure what I was more excited for in the morning — presents or the Flood.


Michael Ubaldi

Two distinct and complementary memories describe Christmas 1989. In the first, I sat one chair from the head of the dining room table, surrounded by family and good friends, negotiating turkey, greens, stuffing, and cranberry sauce with my knife and fork. In the second, Christmas dinner was over and I had absconded to the basement, alone but for the occasional visitor who came wondering what could pull me away from the fellowship upstairs. My fledgling, little freighter skipped across the stars of Starflight 2: Trade Routes of the Cloud Nebula — bargaining for Singing Beetles from the photosynthetic Tarn, coming to reasonable terms with the vain Lieu Vadish, looking for buyers of the Mbe's flamboyant Screech Harps. Chatter and laughter are fine, but not for certain eleven-year-old boys. There were more important relationships to found and build.




Michael Belanger // December 26, 2009 // 10:43 AM

I can relate to these stories :) Merry christmas gents!


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