1994 · Funcom · Christma · Platformer

Daze Before Christmas

In Daze Before Christmas, you're Santa. According to the game's Christmas calender, you have 24 areas to explore such as factories, workshops, caves, and more. Each area is filled with nasty enemies like penguins, jack-in-the-boxes, helicopters, snowmen, and many others. Furthermore, after every five areas, Santa has to come face-to-face with not only The Evil Snowman, The Timekeeper, and Louse the Mouse, but also Mr. Weather.

Released: 1994
Platforms: SNES Sega Genesis
Genres: Christma Platformer
Developers: Funcom
Publishers: Sunsoft T-15
Modes: Multiplayer Single-player
Perspective: Side view
Themes: Action Fantasy Comedy
Languages: English

About

Daze Before Christmas is a platform video game developed by Norwegian company Funcom for the Mega Drive and published by Sunsoft in 1994 in Australia. It was ported to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and released in Europe and Australia. A North American release was planned but got cancelled.

›Story

Christmas is a time where people get together and give others presents and spend all day eating food. But there's only one problem this year. You see, while Santa was sleeping in his bed, the cold and evil snowman spooked all the elves away, and the Timekeeper has stolen Santa's plans from his house. There won't be any Christmas if Santa doesn't stop them.

Keywords

christmas
bird
snow
snowman
holiday themes
conveyor belt
retroachievements

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

The player controls Santa Claus as he races to save Christmas from an evil mouse who has stolen the kids' presents, and cursed them with a spell. Santa faces foes such as giant rats, evil toys and living snowmen using his magic powers to turn them all into Christmas presents. He can also collect a power-up that makes him shoot flames which melt ice. Santa's magic can also be used to open the Christmas presents scattered around the levels.

These presents may contain enemies, power-ups, bells, elves, or bombs. Santa's energy level is represented by Santa hats, which represent how many hits he can take before losing a life. He can collect more hats to replenish lost energy.

Development

The lead Mega Drive programmer of the game, Carl-Henrik Skårstedt has stated that the game took about a year to develop, but he did not start until the game was six months into development. He also said that he integrated source code from the Funcom-developed video game based on the film We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story into Daze Before Christmas. The game was ported to the Super NES by Olav Mørkrid and the process took about six months.

The level select cheat code for the Super NES version is said to refer to "Badla", the nickname of Geir Tjelta, a musician who worked on the game. The Mega Drive version's level select cheat code is said to refer to the Swedish word "Barra", which refers to a Christmas tree dropping its needles.

Reception

Reviewing the Mega Drive version for the magazine Mega Zone, Matthew Hall gave the game 52/100, saying that while he found the game "cute and cuddly" with "colourful and well-rounded" graphics, the backgrounds were repetitive and the music was droning. He concluded that the simplistic nature of the gameplay limited it to appealing to younger players. Reviewing the same version, Hyper gave it 58/100, calling it "undoubtedly the easiest game in the history of gaming" and opined that while it had "undeniable charm", it was too simplistic for anybody but "very young kids" to enjoy.