A late Merry Christmas everybody! So it's all over and Christmas Day came and went. Now of course Christmas isn't about vidogames... but let's face it, it's the biggest videogame holiday of the year. Here's hoping you got all the games/hardware you were looking for. I know for myself I got an HD webcam so I can start on some video work of my own for the site! I've got a few ideas that I hope to start poisting right here on the blog section so stay tuned. Also I need to work my way through Resident Evil 5 finally... We'll see how those two prioritize themeselves. :)

Now Roo got me thinking about some Christmas memories in gaming. I realize that all of us probably have more than a few favorites from years past that bring warmth to our hearts. I have to say my favorite Christmas for gaming was probably about 12 or 13 years ago. A few months before the holidays my family had purchased a Philips CD-i. We mostly used it for movies and music with a few games but nothing really in particular. Well that Christmas, we got a crapload of CD-i stuff that just made myself and my two brothers go ape. We even got the digital video cartridge which gave the machine the extra horsepower it needed to run FMV like a champ. Armed with our new(er) games like Lil' Devil, Kether, and Who Shot Johnny Rock?, my brothers and I were in an FMV induced coma for the next three days. We also gained great expertise in positioning the IR sensor for the light pistol just right so you could actually hit something in the shooting games.

Now I know what you're asking me in your heads here, wait a second there Commodore, all those games suck major ass! How could you have had any fun with those games? Well ok fair enough... These games did suck ass and they never stopped sucking ass no matter how much or little we played them. But we had an awful lot of motivational help from games like Mad Dog McCree (which we had all played in the arcades by then) and one of the greatest gaming experiences of my life: 7th Guest. Now say what you will about my questionable at best CD-i gaming lineup, but for all of you that played 7th Guest on anything but the CD-i, it is I who feel sorry for you. The FMV was so much more crisp, the resolution on the pre-rendered scens made them just look miraculous at the time, and the best part of all was how good the music was. No cluncky DOS interface, no choppy granulated cursorts or video. Just pure gaming fun. And along with all of my friends we jumped on the old CD-i and played that sucker that Christmas until we got toally and completely stuck on the house light puzzle at the end. Then we looked it up on AOL and went about our business. The point is we had a great Christmas of gaming in spite of Link: The Faces of Evil and that horrible pile of rubbish Creature Shock.

You see gamers, all to often we miscategorize our love for videogames by using the noun games to describe our experience. This is what makes non-gamers think we sit around playing Monopoly with all of our free time and that Free Parking is the meaning of life to all of us. In reality, what we really find fun about videogames are not the games themselves but the experience of gaming. That Christmas was great, not because we played all amazingly great games, but we because we played videogames with our friends and more importantly we created wonderful experiences that we will treasure for years to come. And like so many things around the Hoilidays, it's not what we actually do, but who we do it with that is of the greatest significance. Thanks for sharing my favorite Christmas gaming memory and I hope you are all out ther creating many of your own. Merry Christmas everyone!