Season's Gamings

Growing up amid the violence of Johannesburg in the early '90s meant that Christmas was a little bit different for John Szczepaniak. He remembers one holiday where all he wanted amongst the black-market imports and counterfeit games available was a Famicom clone.

Christmas can be a bittersweet time of year for a PC gamer. If your hardware is up to snuff, you have a feast of games to choose from. But what if your system clocks in just below the requirements for the hottest new game? Rob Zacny takes us back to 1997, when a new computer stood between him and Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II.

For Mark Brown, Christmas always means two things: videogames and loads of stress on his parents. But last year, he found the perfect way to show his mom and dad he cared: a custom Christmas level of LittleBigPlanet.

Two years ago, Jim Rossignol found himself in a dream scenario for Christmas humbugging: Instead of visiting relatives, he'd stay at home and game to his heart's content. But a bizarre run-in with a group of Chinese currency farmers made him reconsider his merciless ganking ways. Rossignol recounts his Christmas spent in Eve Online.