Games of Christmas past

Game of the Week is part of the Eurogamer Essentials newsletter that goes out to our supporters every Friday and hits the site on Sundays. I hope you're having a splendid day (and haven't you got better things to be doing than reading Eurogamer? Go and drink a sherry or something!)

That's it. We've made it. 2022 is wrapped - about as neatly as the awkwardly shaped bottle of toiletries that's sitting under the tree held together with copious amounts of sellotape, but wrapped it is all the same. We'll be taking a short break over the festive period, which means hitting pause on Game of the Week until we're back at full tilt in January (and when there might even be some games to write about, too - 2023's looking like a bumper year already).

For as long as I've been playing them Christmas has been inextricably linked with video games. Maybe it's because so many of the defining moments in my gaming life have started out at the foot of a Christmas tree; a Commodore 64, late into the machine's life, that was my first ever piece of hardware, on which I'd play endless amounts of WEC Le Mans. A Game Gear with a set of six AA batteries that wouldn't see past Christmas morning, packed in with its 8-bit take on Sonic the Hedgehog (it's only recently I've realised how lucky I was - Ancient's spin on what would become an iconic series still stands out as the best of the first generation of Sonic). An original PlayStation, which was the most exotic of them all; that fresh window into the new world of 3D, and the feeling that games had just changed forever.