Fatherwags’ Christmas Wish-List

1. Game: Gears of War 2
Title: Kris-py Kringle Mission Pack
Price: $5

An extra side-mission inserted into Hive (Act 4) wherein Dom and Marcus go to search the Locust Nexus for Dom’s wife, Maria, would be the ideal reward for fans of the series. The first thing the DLC would do is add to the speech given by the old Stranded guy at the beginning of the act. Not only would he say that Maria looked familiar, but he would also mention one person who had escaped the Locust work camps and had been raving about seeing some guy in a ratty and dirty red suit being dragged into one of the coffin-like prison cells.

As the guys proceed through the different containment areas, they see tatters of red cloth and maybe the occasional twisted and deformed little body with pointy ears. They are following the Locust patrol towards Maria, but their way is suddenly blocked and they are attacked from the side. Once Marcus and Dom defeat the troops they see a tunnel and enter it. They fight through to a new area with what looks like the remnants of a crashed sleigh and the burned and mangled bodies of reindeer, before eventually arriving in the “boss” area, where a huge group of Locust are laughing and dancing around the queen as she wears a red hat with a white ball on top and sings “Home for Christmas.” Once they kill all the grunts and drive off the queen, Dom cracks open a coffin cell to find a horribly mutilated and nearly dead Santa Claus, who keeps mindlessly repeating “And to all a good night . . .” After he hands him a flame-thrower (Marcus has already learned his lesson about handing out shotguns), tells him to suck it up and assist with the search for Maria, Marcus turns around and Kris Kringle commits suicide by turning himself into Kris-py Kringle. Marcus then immortalizes the moment with a heartfelt, “Aw, shit!”

Marcus and Dom leave Kris-py behind and find their way back to the main path of the mission, catching up to the patrol in the next area so they can continue the search for Maria.

See what I’m talking about? Powerful and emotional holiday gaming experiences the whole family can enjoy. You’ll be able to reminisce for years about that time cousin Sarah scored headshots on two grunts with just one active reload, or the time Auntie Karen went through the entire level on Insane and using only melee attacks, or the year when Uncle Artie’s puke looked just like what was left of Kris-py Kringle. Those are the kinds of memories that immortalize a game.

2. Game: Fable 2
Title: The Santa/Satan Clause
Price: $10

You’re out near Bower Lake, it’s night, and it’s snowing. Suddenly you see a burning fireball, which looks a lot like a sleigh and reindeer, sizzling across the sky (Christmas and cozy fires – notice a theme here?). It crashes into the lake; you run over to the wreckage and drag a portly, red velvet-covered body to the shore. You still see an odd, red glow emanating from under the water and your dog keeps pointing to the water and barking as if there’s some treasure there. You dive back into the lake and drag out a nearly-drowned reindeer with a red nose.

When you examine the body you find a scroll that tells you that you have found the legendary Santa Claus. The scroll says, in very small print, that anyone who finds the body of Santa Claus must, each holiday season, assume the role of toy dispenser. The scroll also tells you that, as Santa Claus, you have assumed the loyalty of his loyal companion Rudolphus the reindeer who, if trained properly, can help you fight battles, find treasure, and even fly. Once you’ve finished reading the scroll and you return to the world, your hero has mysteriously become chubby and now has white hair and a long, flowing beard.

You automatically gain “The Santa/Satan Clause” quest, in which you must gather seven wagons from different parts of Albion then lead them to the far north and gather toys for all the little girls and boys. After picking up the toys, you will have to defend the caravan from a new form of bandits who are covered with short, green fur, as it travels across Albion distributing toys.

However, as this is Fable 2, you are beset by moral choices throughout the experience, each of which contributes to your fame, purity, and goodness. For example, do you kill the bandits or do you recognize that, despite their Grinch-y appearances, they are just trying to find gifts for their own sons and daughters? Maybe you kill them and gain fame, or maybe you will convince their leader to stop stealing by giving them gifts for their kids, and thereby gain goodness and purity. Another moral scenario might be whether you do an additional side-quest to find the missing “naughty or nice list,” or just randomly distribute gifts, thereby fulfilling the requirements of your new job, but not the spirit. In this case, you would lose purity points, but gain fame, because even though you didn’t do the upstanding thing, the bad kids now love you and go to beat up the good kids who are all whining about how they got cheated.

Some other decisions could be whether or not you give the toys away for free or extort the parents to see who will pay the most for a given toy; marketing a crappy and cheap toy by putting up posters and getting the statue-maker to add it to all of your statues, and then charging outrageous prices for it; whether you give all of the bad kids the best toys to encourage more evil behaviour and then sell crappy toys to the parents of the good kids or you give all of the good kids the best toys and give the bad kids coal; you could even decide whether you want to give kids free rides on Rudolphus or charge them for a ride, either of which would start a mini-game in which you would have to balance the child on the reindeer’s back using a slider – the higher the multiplier, the more fame or money you gain from each ride.

Once you’ve finished all of the related quests and made all of the moral choices, your morality will be graded and you will be awarded a new title from the town criers: either Santa Claus (along with the requisite red and white outfit) or Satan Claus (along with a black and blood-red outfit, with devil horns growing out of the hat).

The possibilities are nearly limitless. And as for having two animals following you around, at least one of them is guaranteed to appeal to your family members as they watch you play because there are only two types of people in the world: dog people and reindeer people.

3. Game: A Kingdom for Keflings
Title: Santa’s Workshop Expansion Pack
Price: $2

Xbox Live Arcade should definitely not be immune to this kind of holiday spirit, and A Kingdom for Keflings, as one of the landmark Avatar-based Arcade games, is poised to take full advantage of gamers this season. I’ve only played the demo, but it seems like this game has something to do with gathering stuff so you can get more stuff, which is exactly what Christmas is all about. Plus, during the demo I experienced the winter season, and I couldn’t help but think this game deserves the Christmas treatment, North American style.

In the expansion pack, you would be given blueprints for buildings and objects essential for the Christmas experience: a stable, a manger, Santa’s workshop, a sweatshop, media outlets, and a Kefl-mart.

You’ll also given the blueprints for a plant that can generate electricity, for a command center and launch pad that will send satellites into space, and for a power and communications grid that will connect all of the Kefling houses so they receive cable and the internet. All of these are necessary, obviously, to sell the Keflings worthless and inane consumer goods, which, of course, increase the amount of love you can put into each Kefling house. This is exactly what Christmas is all about: buying stuff to generate more love.

With that done, you give one family in your town all of the most expensive, elaborate, garish, and blinding holiday decorations you can find, and then allow the others to be consumed with envy at how that family is able to waste their money on pointless trivialities. This will cause all of the other Keflings to gather resources at five times their normal rate in order to make enough money to go to the Kefl-mart and buy all of the exact same decorations as that first family. If some of your Keflings work themselves to death, don’t despair, because that’s when the bonus ending kicks in. By having Keflings die in four adjacent houses, you can tear down the houses and build a giant, multi-story apartment building to bring in more workers to help gather more resources.

Sounds awesome, right? What could be more evocative of Christmas in North America than that? Plus, this will provide the perfect lead-in to a non-holiday expansion pack: A Kingdom for Keflings: Colonization, Domination, Extinction. Another significant benefit is that once you get your in-laws hooked on this cute little game, all of the extra content that will be made available in the future will ensure that “Dad’s” complaints about “Mom’s” friendly, attentive, and young tennis instructor will be things of the past, as will “Mom’s relentless and uncomfortable comments about “Dad’s” beer belly and lack of sex drive.

4. Game: Fallout 3
Title: Father Christmas
Price: $10

Instead of ending the game the way they do, this DLC would change everything starting with meeting your father. I know the game already has a few endings, which is why adding one more shouldn’t be too much work.

Here’s the idea: you find your father, but he won’t come out of his bunker. You can only see his grainy image on a TV hanging outside the door and you note that he looks oddly like Pere Noel a.k.a Father Christmas a.k.a. Santa Claus. At this point he’s not all dressed up in his holiday attire, but the beard, hair, and jiggling tummy seem to suggest his real identity. He isn’t sure if you’re really his son and sets you a series of tasks to complete before he will believe that you’re his progeny.

The tasks require you to go questing all over the place to do things like finding and eating 100,000 irradiated chocolate chip cookies and surviving, getting your dog’s nose sunburned to a bright red then using it to navigate through a short-lived nuclear winter to deliver a crappy item that will break after five minutes of use to an ungrateful non-player character, finding a bunch of kids on a list and planting irradiated coal under their pillows without them knowing, repeatedly irradiating yourself and running really fast until you are able to move at superhuman speed, and finding all of the items in a bizarre list that includes a bunch of turtle doves and French hens. As you complete these tasks you begin to wonder whether or not you really want this guy to be your dad; you start to recognize that living without a father might not be so bad after all, but being the dutiful or masochistic son you are, you finish the tasks anyway.

Once you’ve accomplished everything, you return to him and he admits that he must be your father because all of those tasks you’ve just completed are exactly what he does every year. That’s the shocking twist. Then he comes out of the bunker looking exactly like Father Christmas, which is, of course, exactly who he is. But then it gets even shockier (sic) when he pulls off his “face” and shows you that he’s really a horribly misshapen super mutant who now wants to make amends to you for ruining your life and abandoning you by spending quality time with you, playing baseball, going fishing, and building thermonuclear devices to kill all of the “bad kids” who have been making your life so miserable for so many years.

Everyone deserves a happy ending at Christmas time, and Fallout 3 is poised to provide that. However, if this evokes torturous memories of your own dysfunctional family Christmas from when you were eight and your long lost dad returned, thinking the best way to bond with you was to get drunk and hit on your step-sister, don’t worry: it’s nothing a few months of intensive psychotherapy can’t fix. Probably.