A couple days belated, but last week was primarily about the run-up to Christmas. My routine for the last several weeks has been to wrap up dinner then settle on the couch with my Steam Deck, play something, and have a movie on in the background. I think as a result I’ve seen more movies in December than the preceding decade.
In alphabetical order:
- 8-Bit Christmas (2021)
- A Christmas Story (1983)
- Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas (1977)
- Frosty the Snowman (1969)
- Groundhog Day (1993)
- Home Alone (1990)
- How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
- Klaus (2019)
- The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)
- Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964)
- The Santa Clause (1994)
- Scrooged (1988)
- Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)
- Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1987)
- A Very Murray Christmas (2015)
- White Christmas (1954)
I have thoughts about most of them, but I think I can summarize and say that the only one I for sure wouldn’t watch a second time is the original Silent Night, Deadly Night, and that’s because the first 30-45 minutes of Part 2 are a direct re-telling of the original. That was a fun back-to-back watch one night.
The other thing I noticed is that Rudolph has some interesting and unintended cultural commentary. It’s a film that I don’t think would get made today, and not just because it’s claymation. The premise that someone should be ostracized because of a small physical difference that has no bearing at all on their abilities basically doesn’t play in our society anymore, for good reason. That this was ever considered “acceptable,” I think, explains a lot about my parents' generation. But I’ll always stan the island of misfit toys.
While watching all these movies I mostly played Dave the Diver, which I would give something in the neighborhood of 80%. It’s basically a series of minigames wrapped in a roguelike. Which are all words that generally would not recommend a game to me. However, there’s a lot of charm, the roguelike parts are mostly not awful and only punishing when you “lose,” which very quickly becomes easy to not do.
Most of the minigames are only forced on you once, and then become entirely optional for replay. And it’s impressive for the sheer breadth of how many different kinds of games they snuck in. In later stages it’s variously a Tomagatchi, a business simulator, a rhythm game, and a bullet hell. It’s like the developers tossed the entire kitchen sink at it, with enough fidelity that they all feel like honest representations of their genre. I didn’t exactly enjoy most of them, because they’re not genres I would have wanted to play, but I did enjoy the framing of them in the context of a silly little sushi game, and none of them went on so long or were so difficult that they roadblocked the rest of the experience. Probably the best $20 I’ve spent on Steam in 2023.