 Since we are Days Before Christmas, I thought I'd look at Days Before Christmas, or is that Daze Before Christmas, as in former Chicago Blackhawks right-wing Eric Daze. Anyway, this is a game that only came out in PAL regions. Originally, it was released for Sega Mega Drive, and then it was ported to the Super Nintendo, so the US never saw this game on either platform. And you know, despite how basic and generic this game looks, it's actually halfway decent. It's pretty dang weird though, you're Santa, of course, and you turn enemies like rats, mice, birds, penguins, and whatever these things are into presence with his magic Santa powers, I guess? What kind of presence are those? Your only attack is this projectile, which can be upgraded to flames and other stuff. In addition to that, there's an invincibility power-up that briefly turns you into Satan? What the hell is going on? But yeah, this is pretty straightforward, platforming with 24 varying levels laid out like an advent calendar that represents the Days Before Christmas. Some levels are huge wide-open designs, and some are very short. Part of the appeal here is being able to collect everything in every level, as everything is tallied up at the end, so if you're into 100% runs, there's some replay value here. It's not exactly Donkey Kong Country 2, but it's not bad. Every few levels there's a boss fight, followed by a bonus level where you actually deliver some of the presence you've collected by tossing them into chimneys. That's actually a pretty nice touch. But yeah, the platforming here is just about how you'd expect. You have a life bar represented in Santa hats up top, so you can take a few hits here and there, and it doesn't take long to get a feel for how Santa controls. The sprite work here is really impressive, both for Santa and the enemies and bosses. For such a throwaway game that barely got any exposure, it's evident that at least the developers did appear to work hard on this game. The level backgrounds and themes, so to speak, also look really good. That brings me to some interesting trivia about this game. The developer Funcom reused the same code from the game they made based on the movie We're Back, A Dinosaur's Tale, for Sega Genesis. So if you played that, then this game would appear to be awfully familiar. In addition to that, Funcom apparently only had one guy work on porting the game from Mega Drive to the Super Nintendo, and it took about six months. So yeah, the Mega Drive and SNES games are just about identical. The reason it was never released in the US is because the publisher Sunsoft's the USA branch went bankrupt the same day the port was finished. Whoops. So yeah, days before Christmas isn't anything worth going out of your way to play, but it's not as bad as you might imagine at first glance. It's pretty decent, and the platforming is surprisingly solid. I mean, it beats the hell out of stuff like Bubsy, and the game looks really good. So if you're looking for an overlooked under-the-radar platformer, or you just want a Christmas-themed game since it's that time of year, you could do a lot worse than days before Christmas.