With christmas just around the corner, I thought it would be fun to look at some game that were made specifically on the Christmas theme and that were forgotten about through time. Today we look at a slide view action game from the late eighties that was all about the main man himself – Father Christmas.

In 1989 The Official Father Christmas game was released on the Amstrad CPC. The game was based around Father Christmas on the night before Christmas rushing around the globe to deliver presents to all the children of the world.

There were different platforms to the game before you deliver the presents – the first part of the game consists of gathering pieces of his sleigh from around his house, where you have to avoid the elves that are busy at work. If you do happen to bump into the elves then all the parts of the sleigh that you are carrying become lost and you have to go and find them again. The other game that you have to play is collecting presents as they fall for the ceiling. Before you go into this level you choose which games you have to collect and these are presented as a christmas list at the start of the level. The final section of the game you are flying across a city landscape dropping presents from the sky to deliver presents to children whilst avoiding clouds and aeroplanes.

When i was a child we used to have an Amstrad computer it was given to us by one of my mums friends and we had this game. It was very basic graphics but i used to really enjoy it – some of the levels were quite hard to play as the controls were a bit jumpy but i used to really enjoy playing it and always enjoyed delivering presents at the end.