Christmas video games, eh? Not sure we’ve ever covered one of those on Professional Moron. Well, time to shake that routine up!

As here’s a retro gaming thing called Daze Before Christmas. We’ve never played it. But it’s almost Christmas, dammit, so we need to do something snowy.

Play as Santa in Daze Before Christmas

Jingle bells. Batman smells. Santa. Sprouts. That’s Christmas for you, all of which Norwegian developer Funcom covered for this romp.

Well, actually, there’s no Batman. There’s Santa, though! Yay!

Daze Before Christmas was launched on the Mega Drive (Sega Genesis) first in late 1994, coming out at the same time as Rare’s Donkey Kong Country on the SNES.

So, yes, in comparison this romp wasn’t up to much.

However, and weirdly, Daze Before Christmas was only launched on the Mega Drive in Australia. It was then ported to the SNES and launched in Europe.

But the game didn’t launch in North America at all. Because… we guess because Canadians and Americans hate Santa.

Not that they’re missing much, as the game didn’t meet with great reviews. Here it is in action, as standard platforming stuff.

So, yes, in the game you take control of Santa Claus. It’s his mission to save Christmas! And he must do so from an evil mouse who’s stolen all the presents in the world.

Not only that, he’s cursed the and put a spell on the presents! The evil bastard!

And with that mighty plot developed convincingly, as Santa you go out into levels and jump about a bit whilst listening to 16-bit renditions of Jingle Bells.

However, there is one interesting thing going on. You get to turn into Santa’s evil twin, who’s called Anti-Claus. You do so by drinking a cup of tea.

Once you do that, Santa becomes invincible and you can go on a rampage. Hurrah!

There’s also a kind of Earthworm Jim (also released in 1994) style break between platforming levels, where Santa drops presents into chimneys.

But that’s about it from Daze Before Christmas. Let’s just establish a few things about it:

• It has a stupid name that isn’t funny and doesn’t make sense.
• Santa Claus is in it.
  • We’re doing a review on the game because we have an Exclusive Santa Column we run every year at Christmas.
• It’s a surprisingly rare Santa Claus based Christmas video game.
• The game didn’t launch in North America.
• The plot is stupid.

Yeah, you’ll need to head to an online emulator to play the game. Otherwise it commands high prices on the likes of eBay, due to its scarcity.

But otherwise we can’t get too excited about this one.

It’s a Santa video game. Just one that isn’t exactly great and has the type of plot that a drunk could have bettered in five seconds. Ho, ho, ho!