Emulator Hour: Daze Before Christmas (SMD)

 

Since Christmas Day landed on a Friday this year, and since I have Thursday and Friday off, I thought I would play a Christmas oriented game for today's article.  Believe it or not, there are not a lot of games that are explicitly centered around Christmas, while some games do have side quests or characters from Christmas lore, not many revolve around this wintry holiday.  There are even fewer that have to do with Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, let alone any that have anything to do with Boxing Day.  When I was looking up Christmas games, Daze Before Christmas had come up, but I had written it off as it was released in 1994 for the SEGA Mega Drive system and since I never owned any SEGA systems, I continued my search.  Then I stumbled across RetroGames.cz and through their in-browser emulator and existing library, I was able to play Daze Before Christmas.  Daze Before Christmas was originally released exclusively in Australia on SEGA's Mega Drive, then ported to the SNES, but only in Australia and Europe, hence why I had never heard of this game before I started the concept of this article late last week.

Daze Before Christmas is the story of Santa Claus who was attacked in the days leading up to Christmas by Evil Frosty the Snowman (or just Evil Snowman) and several other unmentionable types, through a magic spell cast upon all of the presents that would be delivered as well as kidnapping and hiding away all of the elves.  And then there is Anti-Santa, whom Santa turns into...when he drinks tea?  Maybe there is a bit of whiskey in Santa's tea as I am not familiar with any lore/mythology regarding Santa and tea, but what Anti-Santa looks like is a cross between Krampus (in that Krampus is the counterpart to Santa, not the anthropomorphic goat demon) and an Oni sporting red skin, horns, and a blue Santa-styled outfit.  I had to look up on my own what the benefits were of turning into Anti-Santa as there was no manual (that I could find) on RetroGames.  But saving Christmas is the premise and since you are the one and only Santa Claus, it is up to you to make sure that all of the presents are delivered on time to all of the nice children throughout the world.

Maybe because it was only the first stage, but Santa's Hallway seemed light on just about everything.  The platforming consisted of walking downstairs and jumping to slightly further away platforms, opening presents, collecting presents, rescuing (the strangest looking) Elves, and hitting enemy rats/mice with a blast of cold air.  There was also a wall-creature-thing that I think you had to be Anti-Santa to get past, but as I was still figuring out the game and mechanics as I was playing, I did not make the connection until a few minutes ago when I found out that Anti-Santa is invincible (only to enemies, or to spikes as well as I assume he is still susceptible to falling into pits?) and this wall would just bat regular Santa away.  So the first area was painfully easy, but that did not bother me too much as I was using my keyboard for controls, which I know I have been against in the past, using a keyboard for platforming games, but the WASD set up has been pretty intuitive so far, but do not be surprised for me to use this as an excuse later on.

After finishing one level by collecting the end-of-stage Star, you move on to what I thought was some type of world/game board looking map that had you start in the bottom left and you would make your way through the 24 stages to reach the final boss and the end of the game.  For Stage 2, you jumped around this board and I must admit that it took me far too long to recognize that what I was actually looking at as not a map/board, but an advent calendar, which is pretty cool in concept, but because you do not actually move a cursor to select the correct stage, it is a little anti-climactic, but I still love the idea of using an advent calendar as the game map and that it does make sense that there would be 24 levels in the game, which also includes boss levels.  Some boss levels contain a short lead up to the boss fight, while the most recent boss fight I finished was a very long (long for this game) stage consisting of what could have been three earlier stages before fighting the boss.

For the most part, levels are paced relatively well, again, with the recent exception of Stage 17 never coming across as too difficult or too long (Stage 17!).

Something that I have found that I love and is quite impressive here, is that before each stage, there is a piece of artwork detailing some aspect of the stage, often with an amusing depiction of Santa in an exaggerated situation.  The artwork in these in-between scenes seems very detailed considering that they are used only once with some stages lasting only a few minutes, seems like a lot of time to spend on something that you can skip with the press of a button.  This makes me wonder if the story, concept, and art for this game were taken either from a children's book or from some other pre-existing source material.  

And then my time playing Daze Before Christmas came to a screeching halt, which I am going to blame on RetroGames.  In the game after each boss encounter, you play a side-scrolling shooter of  sort.  You take control of Santa in his sleigh being pulled four reindeer above the buildings and houses of a particular city/country and while avoiding other flying objects, you have to deposit presents down chimneys; possibly because Santa is on a time crunch after having to deal with the Cold and Evil Snowman's plan to overtake Christmas... or something, it was never made clear why, just that it is.  And in the case of flying over Russia, you are forced to avoid some large, crudely constructed satellites because Sputnik.  In London, you avoid hot air balloons, in Japan, it is, I think, paper kites and some dog with a jet pack, probably because Japan.

After completing Japan (and after all of the other flying and depositing presents sequences) you are taken to a password screen and then you are supposed to move on from there by pressing the Start button, or whatever keyboard key you have mapped to be the Start button; I had the Tab button mapped to Start for the ease of being able to quickly hit it with my pinky if I needed to quickly pause.  Well, that stopped working.  Somehow.  I have tried uploading a previous save file (right after beating Japan) but I still cannot get past the password screen.  I even tried reloading the page and mapping Start to another key that would make sense to me, but nothing seems to be working.  If I am unable to get the website to accept any press of a Start button, I may have to stop my progress here, and I am actually kind of okay with that despite being surprised at how the game plays.

Daze Before Christmas is not the most difficult game and at times it is just plain easy.  Enemies are easy to spot and apart from the bosses, they all take one hit to kill.  Only Stage 17 gave me pause and a few moments of panic as I could not remember when I last came across a bell (checkpoint), some of which are hidden in presents, and I was hit by some environmental hazards more than a few times.  Most of the time I took damage or died because I could not see where I was landing mid-jump.  Some of the music is catchy and it really takes shape and, at least for me, is the most interesting when it plays on a variation of existing Christmas music, such as "Jingle Bells" in the first stage.  If you have a Mega Drive system or an SNES capable of playing European or Australian cartridges, I could see this game being an annual tradition as it very well could be played and beaten in a single sitting, it is a pretty fun game despite Stage 17.  Or you could just play it over on RetroGames, but only if I can figure out why Start does not want to seem to work for me.

Now I know what I'll be asking for for Christmas next year.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian

Instrumental

"Burn in HELL stupid Evil Snowman!