If Xmas was a Mobile Game...

Christmas isn’t just a day. Nor is it just a festival, or just an event. No. Christmas is a full scale military-style operation. It takes planning, reconnaissance, commitment, concentration, diplomacy, and resources. One false move and the human cost is incalculable, but pull off a good clean campaign and you’ll be a hero.

Plus there are crackers, which contain explosives.

Aside from soldiers themselves, there’s only one group of people equipped with the wherewithal to carry this kind of thing off smoothly. That’s right: us gamers. With skills honed by countless hours on Command and Conquer, Metal Gear Solid, and Pac-Man, we’re the finest military minds of this generation. And if Xmas were a mobile game, it would be right up our street.

Level 1 involves the opening salvo of the yuletide war: deciding what to get people. You might think that it’s okay to get everything the night before, choosing from the comparatively limited selection of goods that happen to be available at the shopping centre you visit on Christmas Eve, but nobody’s fooled by your limp efforts. Let’s do this right.

It’s Pelmanism, basically. You have a set of cards face down, and on each of them is a picture of a gift, paired with another identical picture elsewhere in the selection. Each move allows you to turn two cards face up. If you manage to turn a pair, these two cards disappear, leaving you with a diminished range and thus a diminished challenge.

At the end, once you’ve identified all of your pairs, you have to place them beside the correct recipients as determined by crass stereotypes. The Teddy Bear goes to the Boy. The Tenon Saw goes to the Man in a Vest. The Apron goes to the Prim-looking Woman. That kind of thing.

Level 2 is all about shock and awe. Your life partner has brought a tree home, and so it’s your job to decorate it. A supply of baubles, stars, chocolates, lights, and angels constantly streams in at the bottom of the screen and you have to fire them into the tree.

Basically, it’s Bust-a-Move, but with one crucial twist: instead of matching colours, you’re making lines specified by the game in a little window to the right of the playing area.

The end result, if you do it right, is both shocking and awesome.

Level 3 involves buying the presents. This is generally regarded as the most dangerous of the battles in the war of christmas, and it’s one of the most frantic levels in our Xmas mobile game. The set up is, you’re at the shops but you’ve forgotten your list. No need to go home, though, because the items are gradually coming to you.

The level takes the form of a top-down mall, with shops ranged along either side and across the top of the screen. At the top left is a cross section of your brain, and every few seconds gifts appear inside it, sometimes individually and sometimes in combinations. Once an gift idea comes to you, you simply need to navigate to the relevant shop to buy it.

It’s christmas, however, and nothing stays on the shelves for long. You’ve got to get to the shop promptly after the idea appears, or you’ll miss you window of opportunity. To make matters worse, you also need to make frequent visits to the cash machine to replenish your supply of cash, and to the toilets to urinate.

Next, in level 4, you need to find a place to stash your gifts, but the house is full of people. Using a plan view of your house, you need to navigate to the exit without getting caught. It’s like Pac-Man, but about 80 per cent worse.

Never mind, because level 5’s a blinder. The carol singers have arrived with their festive tunes, in much the same way that the German soldiers sang across no man’s land in The Great War. Being a nice sort, you join them.

There are strings of fairy lights on the screen, tilted away so that they retreat into the background. These are the staves. The bulbs drift up them, and you need to press the appropriate keys at the appropriate times to keep along with the music, earning 10 pence for every note struck.

When you miss a note one of the carollers coughs or screams. If you miss five notes in a row, they all vomit and the door slams.

It’s Christmas day, otherwise known as level 6. The war is in its final stages, and all that remains is to loot the goods that have accrued beneath the Christmas tree by unwrapping your presents. This bit’s like Qix.

Next.

Level 7 – the final battle in the festive war. This stage centres around the construction of the season’s most traumatic, elaborate, ambitious and potentially lethal element: the dinner. It’s here that hearts and minds are lost or won.

You’ve got to make the whole meal from scratch, including eggnog and mulled wine. The recipes are to hand, as are the ingredients, but you’ve got to prepare them in a series of inventive mini-games. Need to whip some cream for the trifle? Simply press ‘4’ and ‘6’ in an alternating rhythm until it starts to peak. Need to julienne some carrots? Simply press ‘5’ at stipulated intervals. Voila!

Once you’ve got the ingredients ready, cook and combine them in yet another series of mini-games. Toss the frying pan with ‘2’ and ‘8’ (or manually if you have a phone with an accelerometer.) Layer the trifle by tessellating the parts, Tetris-style. Carefully remove the marzipan from the Christmas cake and throw it in the bin.

I haven’t devised the control scheme for this last part yet, but it’s indispensible. If you couldn't tell, the rest of the game is similar to Cooking Mama.

The other thing that would happen if Xmas were a mobile game, and if it in any way resembled the pathetic farrago I've just described, is that I'd insist on reviewing it so that I could finally use my favourite pun:

Meretricious (and a happy new year.)