It’s going to be a White Christmas
Best Winter themed Video Game stages and TV Christmas Specials
Australia can get hot… Especially around Christmas time (i.e. middle of summer), but the reality is most of our pop-culture and media has been produced in the US and the UK. There’s this ideal of a White Christmas with fireplaces, snow-covered roofs and hot food.
In Australia, we have our own Christmas traditions (barbecues, swimming pools, cold meat cuts, salad, melting into a puddle), but this year, I wanted the chance to cool down and explore the idea of a White Christmas/White Winter with some cold video game stages as well as a Catch Up video talking about some of my favourite Christmas TV Specials.
Favourite Winter Themed Video Game Stages
The review itself consists of video game adaptions of movies set around Christmas (Batman Returns and Die Hard), as well as games that simply have awesome winter-themed stages (like Toejam & Earl: Panic on Funktron).
This was a lot of fun for me to explore. A lot of the time as a kid, an ice-stage meant slippery surfaces, frustration and boring colours. I wanted to reflect on some GOOD Winter and Christmas themed stages. I wish I had a lot more time to explore more games, but hopefully you can find something interesting to play this Christmas and I’d love to hear some of your own recommendations in the comments for next year.
I wanted to wind down the review with a quick look at a few of my favourite Christmas and Winter themed fighting backgrounds. These were all Capcom games, but there’s a lot of love in the backgrounds; some specifically Christmas themed others were more generally winter themed.
Street Fighter 3 w/ Impact
One of my favourites was Sean’s New York background in Street Fighter 3 for the Sega Dreamcast. The Christmas tree does occasionally change spots, but the colours are beautiful and the combination of the urban-style US city street and the old building frosted in snow stood out as a clear favourite to me.
Vampire Hunter (Nightstalkers)
Capcom’s ‘Monster-themed’ 2D beat ’em up certainly has a lot of charm and polish. It’s a really fun game and the extreme nature of the characters means checking them all out is a lot of fun. What I didn’t expect was a very picturesque winter background; The Igloo, the wooden hut and the city far off in the distance (on the left side of the stage).
Best Christmas TV Specials & Movies
Leading into Christmas, the humble TV special plays a very important role. Namely, laying on the Christmas charm thick and heavy and exploring ‘the true reason’ behind the holiday itself.
For me, I really love the imagery. We don’t get snow in Brisbane, Australia so watching these specials takes me back to this ideal Christmas I imagined as a child. It’s incredibly nostalgic.
A running theme in my favourite Christmas specials is humour, especially stuff that isn’t always ‘heartwarming’. Anti-heroes, losers and cheats.
Thanks for another awesome year at the Leftover Culture Review. As always, the support this channel gets from all the comments, likes and shares blows me away and I am truly thankful… To prove, here’s me… smiling?
