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We're at Christmas Eve and it's time for the penultimate festive gift, which is the return of The Daily Click's 2004 Christmas Competition. I have fixed the links to point to archives provided by Chris Street (Circy) and added the screenshots to the page. The theme for 2004 was platformers made in the style of a certain plumber... but more festive.
As noted in Circy's winner announcement post the top two entrants were as follows:
CHRIS: A great, fun game with some wonderful graphics. Eve has really captured the essence of Christmas and Mario, and blended them both together. First rate. The storyline is perhaps a little predictable, but the subliminal gameplay is more than satisfying. One nit-picking point, however, is that the controls can seem to be a little fiddly. I've often bounced off blocks into enemies, thus resulting in death. Other than this annoying niggle, I see no reason why Eve shouldn't win this competition.
PETE: This is another strong contender. It boasts what are the best graphics of the competition by far - lovely pixel work and great little effects to complement it. Christmassiness naturally shines through because of this. The game is quite hard and sometimes feels unresponsive so I docked it a few marks for gameplay. Marioishness, however, is top notch. The game simply IS Mario, without actually being a Mario clone, if that makes sense. The speed of the characters is slightly off so I didn't award full marks for this category.
SHAB: Another good entry! This one is more like the classic Mario than the newer ones, which normally wouldn’t be a bad thing, if the engine responded properly. Not sure If it was just me or not, but I found myself fighting the controls more than anything. This hurts the game in the worse way.
CHRIS: Very not bad at all. The engine is virtually identical to the Mario style which was being asked of everyone, but it was timer based! Because of this the height jumping varied, no matter how long I held SHIFT down. It was hard to stop Santa while he was running as well. Marks lost on the gameplay front for this. Early levels were Mario-esque, but they seemed to turn into standard platform levels later on and the Mario feel got lost on occasion. Santa himself looked very similar to Mario as well. The storyline was quite amusing and effort was clearly put into it, but it looked a little scrappy perhaps. A nice touch was the level map; the only entrant to add this. Graphics overall were nice, although on some levels it was hard to tell which bits were platforms. Summing up, a pretty good effort, but not as good as it could have been, which is a real pity.
PETE: Another excellent entry, very very Mario-like, although I deducted a mark for the ripped music - a minor blemish in an otherwise great game. The graphics are certainly Mario-esque without being too like their inspiration. The story is standard fare (another elf rebellion) but well integrated.
SHAB: As I think this game reached the goal of being the most "Mario-ish" It got the highest marks in that category. Graphics were alright though some bugs present themselves during gameplay, so some minor marks off for that.
Click here for the full scoring and all the games
(including Santasm by Radix, Christmas Conquest by Stephen Lindberg AKA Snerlin, Santa Takeback by Isac Sandelin of Icegames, Santa: A Late Christmas by Phizzy, Santa en Argentino by Jeremiah, and Floating Head Santa by Batel of Neonair)
In other news, if you haven't checked it out there is currently a Clickteam Christmas Sale on Steam and on itch.io too.
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