Greetings and today on Lazy Game Reviews,
we're gonna take a look at the arcade classic by–
[knocking]
Someone bothering me. Just a moment.
Arrgh!
It's... December!
Which means it's time for Christmas Lazy Game Reviews.
[electronic version of "Little Drummer Boy"]
[fizz, sip]
Aahhh!
[typing]
Now I know my show is called "Lazy Game Reviews"
but I don't always review games here.
Which I guess that means that's a lack of foresight on my part,
and I should not have done that, but
it's too late.
Sometimes I just wanna take a look at something that's
a thing.
And today,
Well, I definitely have a thing.
Simple Simon Says Christmas for Windows,
developed by Sygenex, Inc., and published by TDA Help in 1993.
"Music, games, icons, fonts,"
"Screen savers," holy chestnuts!
Aw, man, I'm as excited as an elf on stilts!
Just look at these words and screenshots.
Mmm, so many words,
so three screenshots.
Inside the package, you get the software
on a single 3½-inch high-density floppy disk.
an ad for Simon Says Christmas Clip Art–
Holy balls, I need this, eBay here I come,
oh crap, I can't find it, saved search–
a basic manual and basic addendum
covering the basic usage and basic troubleshooting,
and a piece of cardboard
that makes an unusually lousy nose picker.
Once you've got the disk installed,
just browse the program manager and behold!
A program group is born.
Christmas for Windows '93
is your passport to everything the software contains.
Except the fonts, all two of them,
which are accessed through the Windows font utility, but whatever.
Ugh!
I don't know where to start! There's just so many options!
Help!
Oh, no, this is no help at all.
Is this real life?
Alright, so I dunno. Let's just look at the icon manager.
This lets you change the icons of anything in Windows
to something vaguely Christmasy... sort of.
What this does is take an existing shortcut
and makes a new one by letting you modify the look of it
and apply a short music clip to it.
Seriously.
So, if you've ever wanted Paintbrush
to look like a decapitated Santa head
and play "Jolly Old Saint Nicholas" when it starts,
[MIDI xylophone of "Jolly Old Saint Nicholas"]
Or wanted Notepad to have praying hands
and blast "O Come, All Ye Faithful,"
this is the program for you!
[MIDI pipe organ version of "O Come, All Ye Faithful"]
Finally, my Christmas wishes are now reality.
Joy to the world.
Next is Continuous Carols,
and contrary to its title, it is unfortunately NOT a slideshow
of various famous Carols.
Instead, it's a program that lets you choose from various
MIDI conversions of famous Christmas carols.
Once you've picked from the tunes that you hear 18 million other places during the season,
but for some reason now want on your computer,
just open the Continuous Carols program itself.
This puts a little box on your screen
that plays carols – continuously, even –
until you tell it to stop.
There's really nothing like humming along to "The 12 Days of Christmas"
while you're being violently ripped apart by a giant spider in SimAnt.
[MIDI piano of "12 Days of Christmas"]
No, really, there's nothing like it,
and there never needed to BE anything like it,
but it's actually kind of amazing.
You may have noticed there are also all these icons
with Christmas carol titles on them.
These are just short sound clips that are used with the icon manager from earlier,
and don't anything but play that sound and then stop.
So they're pointless, and I don't know why you'd want them here,
unless you just REALLY need access to the chorus of "The First Noel," like NOW.
Next up, we have Screen Savers,
and you've got three of them here.
Elf Saver is the first one,
which plasters a bunch of elf footprints all over your screen.
So just in case your boss didn't walk all over you enough at work,
now a bunch of Santa's slaved labor force
can walk all over your computer at home.
Next is Happy New Year,
which is perhaps a bit overly optimistic in its title.
Because this screensaver not only tosses up a bunch of fake fireworks on your screen,
it lets you enter in your own messages,
which may or may not be so happy in nature.
And lastly, we have Winter Scene.
This contains a scene of vague wintery-ness.
So that's good.
What else can I say? These aren't exactly After Dark quality,
but what does it matter? They save your screen
and remind you of the time of year,
and that's exactly what they're supposed to do.
You also have the option to make the Winter Scene screensaver into a digital greeting card.
Just insert a floppy disk,
enter the messages you'd like it to say,
and it will write a non-configurable version of the screensaver to the disk
that you can freely distribute amongst your friends.
Balls, yeah! Early-'90s viral marketing!
Next, you get six bitmap wallpapers for your desktop,
or... really for whatever else you want to use them with.
So, yeah! Ornaments and bears and Christmas things.
These are cute or something.
You also have a shortcut that changes your system colors
to something far more bright and festive and
possibly something far more likely to burn holes in your eyes,
with the sheer amount of bright red involved.
And finally, you get three games in Christmas for Windows '93.
The first up is Christmas Tiles, and...
Yeah, it's a tile matching game. No more, no less.
Click on tiles. See what they are.
Try to remember them and select the matching pairs before...
Nothing. Before nothing happens.
Because nothing happens!
Because it's the simplest tile matching game ever devised.
Though you can make giant game boards that go off the screen
and are thus unsolvable, so that's cool.
Next is Holiday Delivery,
and just going on the name and theme, I was reminded
of Special Delivery: Santa's Christmas Chaos.
But no, unlike that game, this one is made of raw, unfiltered suck.
In Holiday Delivery, Santa shambles back and forth along the top of the screen,
and it's your job to click the presents,
peer inside them with your x-ray vision,
and click and drag them to the appropriately numbered house.
It's basically "Mail Sorting: The Game."
If it's a lump of coal, just let it drop.
But the rest of them have to be dragged to the correct house
where it falls to the ground and you're penalized.
The problem with this is everything.
For one, the concept can suck my sugar plums
because it's boring as crap.
For two, the controls are freakin' awful.
You're just using the mouse,
but it's the most unresponsive and picky set of mouse controls I may have ever experienced.
I don't even know why, but the presents are REALLY difficult to grab onto,
and you can only grab them whenever things aren't moving.
On top of that, Santa's drunk
and just tosses out, like, 90% of his payload at once,
so it's almost impossible to get the time to catch many presents.
I know that's probably the point, but the point sucks.
Screw this game.
Lastly, we have Christmas Kye Jr.
This is a game by Colin Garbutt
that actually functions and isn't an exercise
in bare-minimum effort simplicity,
so that's already a huge plus.
It's a pared-down Christmas-themed version of the game Kye Deluxe,
or at least it would be if that game were ever released, so never mind.
If you enjoy games like Chip's Challenge or Sokoban
or even a bit of Boulder Dash,
you'll probably find something to like here.
You play as Kye, the little green ball,
and it's your goal to navigate the tile-based levels and collect things.
Instead of diamonds from the original game,
you collect Christmas presents in this version.
Just like those other games I mentioned, this is a logic game
where you can easily screw yourself over if you're not careful.
But Kye also relies a bit more on fast reflexes, speed and timing
than similar games in the genre.
Whether or not you like that is up to your preferences,
but personally, it's a bit overwhelming to me.
Especially when you throw in all the unique elements
like magnets, one way sliding blocks,
timed blocks and other assorted oddities.
Of course, that's also what sets it apart and kind of makes it fun,
but it's also just a bit frantic.
There are only twelve levels –
one for each day of Christmas, presumably –
and it doesn't include the level editor from other versions,
so that's kind of lame.
But, hey, it's practically godlike in comparison to the other games included on the disk,
so I am not complaining. Go Kye!
And that's Simple Simon Says Christmas for Windows.
Heh heh.
Yeah, it's not exactly the greatest Christmas thing to have ever come out for PC.
I mean, I'm not even sure what that is,
but I can promise you that this isn't it.
But really, what do you expect?
It's a software package that's sole goal
was to set a Christmasy mood on Windows 3.1.
And that in itself is cool to me, just in its oddity.
Yeah, most of it is of dubious quality,
but it did have "Simple" in the title, after all,
and was useful for only a short time of the year,
so I can't get offended.
It's a thing. And it existed.
And now, it's immortalized in this video. So there.
[MIDI piano music]
Would you like to see MORE videos
on THINGS that EXIST,
Christmas-themed and otherwise?
Why don't you open some of these presents
of videos that I've made,
and watch some more?
Or just click "Subscribe" to get more Christmas videos throughout the month of December
and other stuff every week throughout the rest of the year.
And as always, thanks for watching.