Sega’s Christmas Nights is the best Christmas video game

Sega began its theatrical kid Sonic twenty-five year ago. Nights Into Dreams and spun it off into one of the industry’s great examples of fan service. Part demo, part expansion, part companion disc, Christmas NightsThe celebration featured video game bonus features in a festive Christmas theme. This event was free to all players during a time when CD-producing companies had discovered just how affordable they were able to produce them.

Despite the Japanese box art proclaiming “Only This Winter,” for many fans the game has become an annual tradition.

You can play in many ways. Christmas NightsThis is your excuse to have more fun Nachts, since there’s still little else like it. Sonic Team’s game came about when studios were experimenting with how to make 3D platformers. Nintendo went for open 3D stages in Super Mario 64. Naughty Dog steered players down narrow roads and through side-scrolling areas. Crash Bandicoot. Sonic Team also dropped jumping in favour of a character-based race game that saw you fly along a 2D plane, with a 3-D world behind.

Nachts earned extensive critical acclaim, but didn’t reach anywhere near the sales of Mario and Crash, and never became big enough that competitors started copying it. You can play by clicking here Nachts now doesn’t feel like the first iteration of something that has been refined for 25 years; it feels like the best version of something we haven’t seen since (apart from a disappointing 2007 Wii sequel).

As a follow-up bonus disc designed to help sell Sega’s Saturn hardware in Japan, Christmas Nights offered Sonic Team the chance to drench its game in decorations and holiday-themed music, and to overload it with “presents,” like a karaoke mode, a time attack mode, and a music player. The developers also leaned heavily on Saturn’s internal clock to unlock features on different days and at different times of day, which — apart from the the obvious surface-level concept — is why some folks like to play it on Christmas, where they can see different background effects throughout the day. Sure, you can change the clock and do that any time (and the game includes unlockables year-round, even if you don’t mess with the clock). But if you’re going so far as to pull out a 25-plus-year-old console to play it, sometimes it feels nice to do things the way they were intended.

Play if you like Christmas NightsFor something more contemporary, it can be found inside the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 ports. Nachts — the latter of which is playable on Xbox Series X. Those versions are missing a few things from the Saturn original, though, like the bonus mode Sonic the Hedgehog Into Dreams, where you run around in 3D as Sonic — which was awkward even by 1996 standards, but gets a pass considering how rare guest characters were back then.

This is your public service message. There’s no bad time to play Christmas Nights, but on the 25th anniversary of the day the game was named after, it’s rarely felt more appropriate.