I've known Jake Kazdal for about 15 seconds before he's talking to me about Shigeru Miyamoto. We meet outside the International Manga Museum in Kyoto on a dazzling afternoon, bright with an edge of wind. It's the beginning of November, and Kyoto is announcing the arrival of autumn. Kazdal is talking about video games, in a roundabout way. He usually is, whether we're eating ramen at Ippudo around the corner, or sitting in his office playing Galak-Z, the space shooter his studio 17-Bit is hard at work on, or winding through the narrow alleyways where Kyoto's nightlife comes alive at dusk. He loves games in a way that I first found inspiring and later envied.

I really, really like video games. But not as much as Jake Kazdal.

He leads me into the Manga Museum's small cafe, where legendary artists have visited and sketched their creations on the wall. Kazdal points out Miyamoto's charming Mario pen drawing in a far corner. I always knew Miyamoto was the man behind Mario, of course, but I didn't know he drew the iconic plumber, too.

Nintendo's headquarters are in Kyoto, a 20 minute subway ride from Kazdal's office near the Manga Museum. Later I ask if he knows where Miyamoto eats lunch. "I do not. I haven't started stalking him yet, but it's all part of the plan as soon as I get some free time," he jokes.

Kazdal hasn't even really had time to unpack yet. 17-Bit is in the last few months of development on Galak-Z, which seems like an odd time to move a studio halfway across the world, from Seattle to Japan. I met up with Kazdal because I was interested in playing Galak-Z, seeing how it's changed since the last build we played at PAX, and what the move to Japan meant for the game's final few months of development.

What I got was a rare unfiltered look into the development process of an indie game and what makes its creator tick. Galak-Z was rough and unfinished, with bugs here and undubbed lines of dialogue there. It was simply the most recent build the team had been working on, with broken scripted moments and events that may well have been working a few days before. And it was, despite all of that, a hell of a lot of fun to play.

I sit on a tatami mat in 17-Bit's new office a dozen floors above downtown Kyoto and flit through space in Galak-Z's nimble fighter, while Kazdal takes notes on a yellow legal pad. He asks questions while I play, jotting down when the AI didn't behave to his liking or bits of dialogue didn't properly trigger. As I play, we talked about his take on game design, Galak-Z's inspiration, and the risks of moving 5000 miles a few months before shipping a game.

Galak-Z: roguelike meets Halo meets SHMUP

Galak-Z is a daring game, though it seems like a cocktail of surefire gaming favorites. It looks like an anime-inspired twin-stick space shooter roguelike with gorgeous Macross explosions and a fighter straight out of Battlestar Galactica. That hits about seven gamer demographics at once. And it is actually all of those things—except a twin stick shooter. Galak-Z's craft fires in the direction it's pointing, and it controls with a weighty sense of propulsion, like the sleek hovercraft of the WipEout series. Mastering the fighter's zero-g acrobatics to shoot enemies while weave through clouds of bullets takes real skill.

Your shields drop fast. If you're not willing to run from fights, you will die. The ship has both forward and reverse thrusters that can whip it around in any direction, but you still have to account for momentum. Holding down a button to lock-on a flurry of expendable missiles can instantly devastate a tough enemy, but staying alive in the middle of a fight long enough to get that lock is playing a dangerous game. Galak-Z immediately makes you realize how easy twin-stick shooters are, by comparison. Enemies aren't there to be killed by the thousands for a high score.

"I'm not a big twin-stick shooter fan, so that was never really on the board," Kazdal says as I try to get the hang of the ship's controls. "If you're shooting a million enemies, it's a different kind of rush. But I like more thoughtful combat. You have a lot of responsibility in this game. The physics, just maneuvering in the environment is one thing, and lining up your shots, it's not easy. It's difficult to line up your shots. It's like this combat simulator in this zero-g space based on real physics."

AI plays a big part in Galak-Z's combat, which takes as much inspiration from Halo as it does R-Type or Gradius. Rather than a constant stream of enemies, Galak-Z's three AI factions (Imperials, pirates, space bugs) show up in small clusters that you can barrel into for short, tense firefights. They're tough, even on the lower difficulty levels. Galak-Z's difficulty ramps up through seasons structured like an anime TV show, with five episodes comprising each season. I made it about ten minutes through the first episode before dying to an enemy that I most definitely should have run away from to let my shields recharge.

"I hate that you can die in our fucking tutorial," Kazdal says as my ship explodes into space dust. "I've been fighting with the system designer about it. I think I'm going to take it out. The goal is to get you into the game as soon as possible, not to take you out."

I skip past the tutorial when I jump back into the first episode. Bits of un-voiced dialogue try to introduce me to my next mission. Like most contemporary roguelikes, Galak-Z uses procedural generation to vary its episodes each time you play them. An episode's objective won't change, but the environments and layouts of missions will.

Galak-Z is the first roguelike I've played that really and truly thrives on its combat. In Spelunky, Binding of Isaac, even Nuclear Throne, I feel like the goal is to survive, to progress, to make it as far as you can in a single run. That's what makes a roguelike a roguelike. Galak-Z is an action game first and foremost; the roguelike structure simply ensures that its missions will play out differently, one run to the next.

Kazdal takes notes as I play. The game's weapons dealer, Crash, who appears in random locations like Spelunky's shopkeeper, won't talk to me when I fly near him. Bug. He writes it down. An objective doesn't trigger when I finish the mission. He writes it down. Health packs are supposed to show up in the shop to offer mid-mission ship repairs, but they aren't rendering. Bug. Pad.

"This is game design," he says. "Why did this break now? So many things are so subtle." Kazdal spends as much time as he can just playing the game over and over again, partially looking for bugs and potential issues, but mostly scrutinizing every moment of a combat encounter. That's all done on feel. "You play a bunch and you play a bunch and you feel it out. I just get this really strong gut feeling, like this is moving in the right direction, but this guy is too hard, this is too unforgiving, this doesn't feel good. A game should feel good, you know? That's the bottom line."

Galak-Z obviously needs its last bits and pieces to be sewn together, and then it needs polish. But it's fun, even when it's not quite working right, even without most of its weapon upgrades at my fingertips and sound cues missing. As we talk about the game, I think about how many tiny details can dramatically affect the playability of a challenging game like this.

One bit of UI looks just a little too much like an arrow indicating the direction of an objective, but it's not. Kazdal is still thinking about and experimenting with how weapon upgrade unlocks will work. A small change there could totally alter the balance of tougher missions.

One of the pirate enemies looks just a bit too much like an Imperial, and I die, confused, when I lead him to a group of pirates and expect them to fight. When you pull this off, it's one of the most satisfying elements of Galak-Z's AI design. The factions will blow each other apart and leave you feeling like you've survived the battle at the end of Serenity.

Kazdal is director, lead artist and designer, but he's not a programmer. Whenever he feels like something's just a little bit off in a Galak-Z playtest, he has to communicate to the members of the team who actually write the code. "I'm like, it's not as fun as it used to be...something's wrong. I'll talk to the programmer who's like 'no no no, everything's fine,' and I'll say 'can you take a closer look?' And they'll be like 'you're right, [this enemy] used to back off at this time, and someone changed their reaction time from 2 seconds to 10 seconds.' Shit just breaks naturally. It's like ghosts in the machine. If you're not paying total attention, a lot of that shit could just go away, stuff we worked really hard on could just evaporate."

On the next page: a 5000 mile move and the nightlife of Kyoto.

17-Bit goes to Kyoto

17-Bit's full-time staff of eight is split between Seattle and Kyoto, where Kazdal has opened up his new small office as an incubator. He plans to upgrade to a larger space when the rest of the team move over. Until Galak-Z is finished, they'll continue working as two separate offices. When the work day is over in Seattle, it's 10 am in Kyoto. Since moving, Kazdal has been badgering his Seattle team for changes in the evening as he plays the latest builds. He says he'll play all weekend and come into work on Monday to yell about everything broken in the latest build.

You can imagine Kazdal yelling. He's burly, especially in Kyoto, where he's taller than most people on the street. But he's also quick to laugh and always seems to have a story perfect for the moment at hand, plucked from a rolodex of enviable memories. It's easy to picture his yelling as more bluster than bite; he just seems to be having so much fun, all the time.

Maybe that's because he's in Japan.

"I've been planning to move back since I left 11 years ago," Kazdal says. He moved to Japan in the 80s and worked in the games industry until 1993. He came back in 1999 and worked at Sega until 2003, where he was an artist (he got the job after an E3 dinner with Tetsuya Mizuguchi, where they talked about their dream game inspired by the concert sequence in Macross Plus. That game was Rez). Kazdal was in awe of the design skills of the team he worked with on Rez--the way they thought about games, beyond just art and animation chops. That pushed him to leave Sega in 2003 to go back to design school in Los Angeles to be a concept artist.

"I ended up getting pulled into the Steven Spielberg project at EA, which I couldn't say no to. LMNO. I worked on that for a couple years. Even then, I was like how can I get back to Japan, how can I get back to Japan. I interviewed at a couple places, but for one reason or another it wasn't destined to be just yet. Upon starting my own company, I was like, I know what I'll do, I'll start my own company, and if it's at all successful...it would be the perfect excuse to just come over here on my own terms and just work the job I want to work on, the projects I want to work on, build the team I want to build."

Being back in Japan is the payoff for 11 years of waiting for both Kazdal and his wife, who is Japanese. Kazdal may not be from Japan, but it is clearly home to him. And not just Japan, but Kyoto. Kyoto is special.

"Just being here, being around so much more game culture is priceless to me," he says. "I'm really into classic manga and classic anime, 60s 70s and 80s stuff. There's tons of used bookstores and comic shops. I can just go buy this mid-century Japanese illustration that I'm super in love with that's really hard to come by in the states. There's just a really cool classic gaming culture ingrained here. Kyoto is the home of Nintendo. It's the home of video games in a lot of ways, especially the home video game movement, and a lot of those old school dudes are still around, and a lot of that energy is here. For a Nintendo nerd like me, it's kind of a mecca. It sounds super nerdy to say, but it makes a difference to be here, crossing paths with some of these people, getting to know some of these people."

Kazdal didn't only move to Kyoto to pray at the shrine of Nintendo, however. He and his wife thought about Tokyo—briefly. "My wife said no way," he says with a grin. Tokyo was too expensive, too familiar. They'd both spent years there. So they decided on Kyoto, where an American-sized house is affordable, and Kazdal can tweet photos of his unfairly scenic bike commute to work. Downtown Kyoto, where 17-Bit has its office, is modern and vibrant, but a 20 minute bike ride outside the city opens up into the idyllic countryside of a Ghibli film.

Everyone who joined 17-Bit knew that the move to Japan was going to happen sooner or later. First, it was supposed to happen earlier in development, but they delayed the move for financial reasons. Then it was supposed to come after Galak-Z shipped, and Kazdal promised his wife they'd be in Kyoto by September so their oldest son, five, could start school. Galak-Z was supposed to be finished by then, but it wasn't. It was delayed, as games often are, and pushed back into the first few months of 2015. So they committed to the move, rented a shipping container, threw away half of their worldly possessions, and waved goodbye to Seattle.

Now the team has to learn how to work around the time difference. While they're sticking together to ship Galak-Z, 17-bit won't be the same team when they start their next project.

"Everybody who did come in as an employee in the studio, I was crystal clear with: hey, sooner or later the company is moving to Japan," Kazdal says. "You can be in or out, but you need to understand that. Hopefully you'll come with me. Most people were in for awhile, and once we punted [on the first move] a couple guys have decided not to make the move. It's a scary move, if you haven't moved here before. I have a lot of friends and family here, I speak the language. But for somebody who doesn't have any history here, it's a much bigger commitment."

Kyoto nights

If you don't speak Japanese, it's hard to imagine uprooting your life and moving across the world to make video games. And some of the 17-Bit team who want to move may not be able to; Kazdal's immigration was easy, since his wife is Japanese, but getting a work visa can be a challenge. If I hadn't been to Kyoto, I'd think the idea was crazy. After spending only a few days there, I didn't. Part of me knows that it would be difficult and isolating to live there without speaking fluent Japanese. Mostly I don't care; I want to live in Kyoto, myself, desperately and irrationally.

Since leaving Kyoto, memories of the city flash randomly into my mind with a pang of loss. The ambiance of a city full of people riding bikes to work, lingering at slow-turning crosswalks, never seeming in a hurry to be anywhere. The rolling green mountains reaching across the horizon. The nightlife of a thousand bars and restaurants packed into a few narrow alleyways by the river. The temples, which contrast Kyoto's easygoing modernity with majestic history. The food. God, the food.

After an afternoon of playing Galak-Z, Kazdal and I walk through the dusk to meet up with two of his local friends and find sushi. We go to a conveyor belt place that he loves. One afternoon shortly after Kazdal set up the Kyoto office, an elderly Japanese man barged into the room, declared himself a Kyoto expert, and demanded questions. Kazdal asked for the best sushi place in the city. His advice was apparently solid. I gorge on eight plate of the best sushi I've had in my life. It costs $13.

Kyoto's nightlife comes alive as we walk streets barely wide enough for two people. Tiny stairwells lead to bars atop bars atop bars. In one with walls formed like a cave, we watch rap videos and drink bad lemon sours. In another, walls plastered floor-to-ceiling with music posters (I spy at least half a dozen Bob Dylans) we drink good lemon sours. We drink Goemon cocktails at the video game-themed bar Cafe La Siesta. Another friend of Kazdal's sits at the bar, watching Kyary Pamu Pamu videos on an iPhone and teaching a pair of Japanese girls how to say fuck and god damn in English.

Kazdal stops to take photos of alleys and promising restaurants, cheerily overwhelmed by the number of new places to visit. I could go to a new place every night for a year and still not try them all, he says, more elated than exasperated. This is the Kyoto he moved for. It would be inspiring even without Nintendo's headquarters or secondhand shops rife with classic manga and games.

"Without sounding too dramatic, I'm probably never going to move back to the States," Kazdal says. "I love Kyoto. I think it's one of the most amazing cities to live in on the planet. I've lived all over the place, I've lived in lots of different cities, and nothing even comes close to Kyoto."

The move may have been a bump in the road for Galak-Z's development, but it seems to have been a small one, delaying rather than damaging. And it's hard to picture Kazdal living and working anywhere else. This is where he fits.

Galak-Z is an important game for 17-Bit—Skulls of the Shogun didn't sell well, despite universally positive reviews—but he says the studio is secure, even if Galak-Z isn't a giant hit. And in Kyoto lies a potential road to more sales—a Kazdal hopes to tap into the Japanese market that's been largely closed off to western games, designed for western audiences.

"I've been in the games industry since 1999," Kazdal says. "I worked at Nintendo during the NES years as a game counselor...All I know how to do is make video games. It's what I've done my entire adult life. So, come hell or high water, I'm going to be doing games somehow."

Photo credit: Mario sketch, the Cafe La Siesta menu, and the photos of 17-Bit's office courtesy of Jake Kazdal.

The holiday season is the perfect time for family gatherings, the exchanging of gifts, and of course, visitations from grim specters who want to show you chilling visions of harrowing realities. Let that paper-thin premise take you below, where we'll look at three games from 2014 presented in a disturbing reality where PC graphics had never been invented! 

It's the text adventures that never were! OoooooOOOOOooooOO!

Styx: Master of Shadows, a third-person stealth game starring a grumpy goblin with a taste for creative murder, was actually pretty good. It earned a solid 78 in our October review, which said it "weaves an entertaining Grimm-like yarn in and around twenty hours worth of furtive fun." With any luck, the next one will be even better—and yes, there will be another.

Word of the sequel came by way of a very brief, silly teaser, in which the eponymous assassin expresses the true depth of his holiday spirit. "Styx will be back in a new adventure, without his Santa hat," it concludes. "Stay tuned!"

And that's it. Not the most thoroughly-detailed game announcement of all time, perhaps, but definitely good news for Styx fans.

Dragon Age: Inquisition looks like it will indeed be getting mods, contrary to popular belief, with work on a particular modding tool proceeding apace.

As stated on the Nexus Mods page, DAI Tools' goal is to make a Skyrim-alike creation kit, so anyone can modify the assets in Inquisition.

DAI Tools has been available since December 19, with the most recent update being a special Christmas present. That, or just one that happened to be on Christmas Day, who knows?

At the time of writing all you can mod is some Skyhold outfit colours, but the fact you can do this shows a promising start for a game a lot of assumed would just remain unmodded.

No word as of yet if EA is sharpening its ban-hammer, or even if it's something that needs to be sharpened. But I for one would hope everything's just left alone - let the tinkerers tinker!

Anyway, here's a brief video to give you a look and offer a tiny bit more explanation:

Get a new desktop or gaming laptop for Christmas? That brand new installation of Windows is lean and mean and lighting fast, but it's lacking some of the must-have applications we use all the time as PC gamers. We're not talking about the incredibly obvious, like Steam and Google Chrome. You probably installed those within seconds of booting up your new computer.

Here are the programs we install every time we start with a clean Windows slate. Don't let your new system live long without them.

7-Zip

Like WinRar, but it never asks you to buy it. Windows' built-in archive tool get the job done when it comes to zipping and unzipping basic files, but for rars and 7zip archives, this is the way to go. We especially like the speed of the "Extract here" right-click menu integration.

Media Player Classic Homecinema

VLC and MPC-HC can both play just about any media file under the sun, thanks to a ton of built-in codecs. In the rare instance that one of them doesn't work, the other almost certainly will. We prefer MPC by a hair, mostly due to its menu layout and how quickly (instantly, really) it starts up. You can't go wrong with VLC, but MPC is our media player of choice for all of our ancient AVIs and newer Blu-ray rips.

Dropbox

You probably have a Dropbox account. And if you already have another computer, getting Dropbox onto your new one first thing is a simple way to copy some basic files over. If you play any games that don't support cloud saves, use Dropbox to copy your save files over and pick up on your new rig.

Mouse driver software

Whatever gaming mouse you use, it's got software to go with it that will let you bind your keys, adjust the DPI, and more. Download it to configure your mouse to your liking.

EVGA PrecisionX

This only goes if you have an Nvidia GPU, but PrecisionX is a powerful overclocking utility you can use to get some more oomph out of your graphics card. We've already written a guide to overclocking your graphics card, which covers how to use software like PrecisionX. It also covers how to overclock an AMD card using AMD's Catalyst software.

FRAPS

Fraps isn't our first choice for capturing video--its lossless recording is too punishing on the framerate--but it's a great utility for capturing game screenshots. Bind the screenshot key to one of your mouse buttons to take shots on a hair trigger. The built-in frame counter is also handy for seeing how well your games are performing on new hardware.

f.lux

Yes, it makes your screen look orange and weird. But stick with f.lux for a few days, and you'll wonder how you ever stared at an eye-searing LCD at night without it. f.lux automatically color tints your monitor as the sun sets to mimic natural lighting. It kicks in towards the end of the work day, warming the typical LCD white-blue to something much easier on the eyes.

Motherboard utilities

If you bought a laptop or prebuilt desktop, it probably already came with all the basic drivers you need for it to work--network adapter, sound, etc. But your motherboard probably has some utilities you could download that come in handy. They often make it easy to upgrade the BIOS from Windows, or overclock from your desktop without restarting and booting into the UEFI. And upgrading your BIOS will ensure that your system is running in tip-top shape. Whether you do that upgrade from Windows or the UEFI, having these tools at the ready will make your new system just a bit nicer and easier to use.

Skype or Mumble

Mumble is our go-to voice chat client for the old school online gaming experience: someone hosts a server, and a whole host of people can pile in to play a big match. Or you can host a team of five for a game of League of Legends. Either way, it's the modern successor to Ventrilo, delivering good sound quality at low bandwidth, and with a ton of tuning options to tweak background noise reduction and so on. Skype is our go-to for smaller groups or one-on-one chats.

Need something to do during the pre-New Year lull? Blizzard is offering a 100 percent experience point bonus to all Diablo 3 players who log in between now and midnight on December 29.

The deal actually went live on December 25, but none of us were around to notice it until now. Fortunately, there's still plenty of time to get in on the action. "All nephalem who log into Diablo III this weekend on any platform* will receive a +100% bonus to experience gain," Blizzard wrote on Battle.net. "As with previous buffs, the bonus provided will stack multiplicatively with other existing bonuses, including those provided by items, shrines, Pools of Reflection, and Paragon points."

The asterisk donates the one little catch, although it doesn't apply to us: On consoles, the buff only applies to the Ultimate Evil Edition. The 100 percent experience bonus offer runs until 11:59 pm PST on December 29.

To celebrate both a full year of development and the end of 2014, Vlambeer is giving early adopters of Nuclear Throne a second, free copy to share with a friend/acquaintance/enemy.

As revealed by Rami Ismail in Vlambeer's most recent livestream - which you can see below - the studio made the decision because the current playerbase is 'too good'.

No, that's legit reasoning - Rami and the team needs feedback from those who aren't expert in order to make Nuclear Throne the best it can be as development continues into 2015.

Rather than slicing the price of the game, which Ismail describes as 'wrong', the decision was made to give out the freebies on January 1.

This also means anyone who buys the game in the next week or so will also get a freebie on the first day of 2015. Huzzah!

The good news is, I'm doing great on time. I'm about a third of the way through my trip to deliver presents to every NPC household in Skyrim (read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here) and I've only burned about an hour and a half. I should be able to wrap this up by midnight. But then, there's Riften.

Better Not Pout

Typically, when I break into someone's home, I get a few stern warnings before they call the guards. Not so at Snow-Shod Farm outside Riften. I let myself in and Leonara Arus immediately draws a dagger and attacks. Outside, some Riften guards do likewise. I take off, but Rudolph crashes into the river, leading to a serious reindeer malfunction.

That's how I arrive in Riften: already wanted by the cops and running in place on a magical reindeer's back. It takes long minutes to make my way through the city, with guards in pursuit, hacking at my body and blocking every single doorway. Eventually, I spot one building in Skyrim desperately in need of a little Christmas cheer: Honorhall Orphanage.

I know this experiment is a goof, but I thought visiting the orphans on Christmas Eve and giving them presents might be, I dunno, a genuinely nice little moment? Well, it's not. Imagine, just for a minute, being an orphan in Skyrim. Your headmistress, Grelod, is in the process of calling you names and telling you you'll never be adopted. Suddenly, the door crashes open and someone sort of dressed like Santa Claus bursts into the room. He's filled with arrows and covered with blood, and there are a dozen soldiers stabbing him in the back as he forces his way through the crowd, dropping pieces of armor and enchanted weapons on your beds.

Santa, apparently exasperated by the ordeal, suddenly whips out a giant two-handed sword and starts hacking away at Grelod, probably thinking to himself, "Might as well do some good while I'm here." He kills her, slashes in anger at a few guards, and flees, leaving behind a dead headmaster, an odd collection of gifts, a bloodstained floor, and a collection of horribly traumatized orphans. Merry Christmas, everyone!

Finally, I flee from Riften, not knowing who I delivered to and who I missed. I no longer care. It's time to fly.

I'm glad that unpleasantness is over with. How about some new unpleasantness, then?

The dragon, ultimately, isn't a huge deal. It can't really drain my extensive hit points, and while it follows me for a good long while, I eventually duck into a home near a mill, and when I emerge, it's gone. I hit another orc stronghold, some farms, and finally reach Windhelm.

The frosty city is wonderfully peaceful. Now that its a bit later, a lot of people are actually sleeping and almost no one is on the street. A give a beggar a coin, a beggar I once considered marrying in another life. I actually make it all the way through the city without triggering the guards and any real animosity from anyone.

Be Good For Goodness' Sake

More stops at mills, and then make my way to Winterhold, which is also uneventful (I can't access the college, however). Next, I visit Frostflow Lighthouse, and let myself in. Then I quickly let myself back out. Santa didn't see nothin'.

At Dawnstar I visit the Dark Brotherhood sanctuary, though the evil door won't let me in so I just drop some coal for those naughty assassins. In Dawnstar proper, I somehow anger a citizen named Hroggar, who follows me from house to house through the entire town, whacking me on the back with his axe. No one else gets ruffled, though: even the guards don't care. It's only 10:35 p.m., so clearly I'm not in a race against the clock. Why not take a little me-time and murder this Hroggar a-hole? I select a gift from my pack, a giant two-handed sword, and cut him down. I take his axe as a potential present, and leave.

Finally, I reach Whiterun, my final stop. I dash in and out of the surrounding farms and mills without issue, and even get through the first few stores in peace. Then I meet Lars Battle Born, who shall forever now be known as The Jerk Kid Who Ruined Whiterun Christmas. He starts warning me, immediately, that I need to get out of his house, despite the fact that I've very nicely dropped a potion of True Shot on his bed. What little boy wouldn't want his bow to do 20% more damage for 60 seconds? He also seems completely unimpressed when, a moment later, I (accidentally) summon Rudolph in his house.

Unimpressed by the appearance of a magical reindeer, the Battle Born kid calls the guards, and I'm back to shouldering my way through crowds of swords and arrows as I make my deliveries. Eventually, I make my way to Dragonsreach. Lydia is there, and is nice enough to fight the guards for me while I stagger around dropping presents. 

In the hall, I snatch a bunch of Santa hats from the barrel and put one on. It took all night, but I finally feel like Santa again! My final stop is the bedroom of Jarl Balgrull, where I sarcastically deposit a spare Santa hat on his pillow while he rouses from slumber. Remember me, Jarl. Remember the hat. That's my calling card. And I'll be back. Santa will be back... for you.

I'm officially calling an end to Christmas. I burst onto the Dragon Porch, summon Rudolph, and take off, circling back for one more angry pass over the heads of those anti-Santas. It's 10:56 p.m. I know I probably missed a ton of NPCs amidst the crowds of guards, but I did the best job a I could. I may not be the best Santa, but I'm the Santa Skyrim deserves.

Happy holidays! And remember, if you see Santa this Christmas, please don't summon the guards.

If Xenonauts were receiving a proper award, it would be X-Com of the Year. It is, in its design, structure, depth and challenge, utterly X-Com. It's blatant in its similarities, almost flagrant. Not even XCOM, the Firaxis reboot, was this much like X-Com. That's why Xenonauts could never hold a place in our Game of the Year Awards proper. It's intentionally derivative. It's not forging a bright, new future for PC gaming. It's not even proving that new design innovations can fit snugly into older templates, a la Divinity: Original Sin or Endless Legend. It is, pretty much, just X-Com again.

That's a good thing, to be clear—or, at least, a thing that I'm happy has happened. Every year PC Gamer picks a fresh Top 100. It's a round-up of our favourite 100 PC games, judged from a present-day perspective and unfettered by nostalgia or reverence. X-Com made it last year, but didn't place highly. It came 83rd; XCOM: Enemy Unknown came 6th. It's easy to see why. XCOM is the better game, able to more cleanly express the core idea and hone in on the most relevant and engaging systems. But X-Com is the more interesting game. It's deep, complex, brutal—all the things that can make a game so satisfying to master. It's also 20 years old, and it shows. That interface still gives me nightmares.

That's why Xenonauts is a success. It has the same complexity and depth, and, as such, is filled with impossible situations that so effectively punish even the smallest of mistakes. But it's all wrapped up in a package that works. The interface is clean, and the graphics are crisp. That, it seems, is all it takes to revitalise such a well-proven template.

I'm being somewhat unfair. Xenonauts does do more. It's like a really good cover song: familiar and comfortable, but given a fresh twist and its own distinct personality. You can tell how fond its developers were of the Gollop brothers' game. The things they've fixed and tweaked are the sort of things that only dedicated fans would think to fix and tweak. The changes feel born of people who have spent long enough staring at an isometric battlefield to think "yeah, you know what? This is bullshit."

For instance, you are no longer responsible for every aspect of administration. You have an unlimited supply of medkits, grenades and stock weapons, because you are in charge of saving the goddamn world and maybe buying basic supplies is not the best use of your goddamn time.

The peculiarities of the setup that do remain intact are there because they're vital to what the game is. You're the world's last line of defence, and so even if North America does have a shitty time under your watch, it makes no sense for them to pull their funding and go it alone. But then, that's the key challenge: that's what keeps the world map screen such an integral and tense part of the game's strategy layer.

That's only one half of what made X-Com—and thus what makes Xenonauts—such a lasting classic. The turn-based tactical assaults are an almost paralysing web of choice and consequence. Xenonauts nails these missions. They're completely open ended in how you choose to approach them, both in the tools you take, and the decisions you make on the ground. You have a broad array of options, and many of them will result in catastrophe. Xenonauts does catastrophe right. It's version of Chryssalids are bloody terrifying—a near unstoppable force that colonises the map, turning civilians and soldiers alike. There's nothing that tells you you've made a mistake than being forced to gun down the mindless zombie that was once your top sniper. There's also little that's more effective at giving you the motivation to do better.

It's Christmas. Would you like a free game? Of course you would! Thanks to our friends at Playfire, you can get a free Steam key right now. Follow the link for full details.

It's the 24th of Evening Star, Skyrim's version of December. As I stand at the North Pole (Septimus Signus's Outpost, the north-iest point I could find), 7:59 clicks over to 8:00 p.m. It's time to deliver a present to every NPC household in Skyrim. (Confused? See Part 1.)

Coming to Town

I hop on Rudolph's back, then hop back off. I know I decided not to deliver to caves, but Septimus Signus is, like, right here. I run into his ice cave where he's pacing around. He looks cold. He doesn't even have a bed. I drop him a bear pelt.

Then I'm off for real! I hop onto Rudolph and fly my way to my first real stop: Solitude Lighthouse, home of an NPC called Ma'zaka. Ma'zaka's door is locked, but my new Knock spell works perfectly, and at 8:03 p.m., I break in. He's standing right inside the door and immediately warns me: "You're not supposed to be here." After stumbling around for a moment, I find his bedroom in the back, and drop a Amulet of Dibella on the floor next to his bed.

"Last warning," he says. "Leave. Now." Well, merry Christmas to you too, jerk.

I head to the Thalmor Embassy. Along the way, I begin to discover a few of Rudolph's flaws, namely, that when he collides with something, like a mountain or an invisible wall at the edge of the map, he plummets to the ground. Also, when I climb off his back, I sometimes continue to fly on my own. Trying to open doors when you're hovering eight feet above them is tricky.

Another problem: the Thalmor Embassy is locked, and needs its own key. My Knock spell can't open locks that can't normally be picked. Oh well. I drop an Amulet of Kynareth at the feet of the Thalmor Wizard guarding the entrance. "Just leave your refuse wherever you see fit!" she spits sarcastically at me. Ho-kay. I'm not really feeling the Christmas spirit so far. I'm off to Solitude.

I deliver gifts to the residents of The Winking Skeever, the city's inn, and magically pick the lock of Radiant Raiment. I crash around looking for the owner's bedroom while she issues warnings to me to leave. Before I can navigate my way out of her home, she starts yelling. "Guards! Help! Tresspasser!" That's when Christmas officially gets messy.

Outside, the guards try to arrest me, and I flee into Angeline's Aromatics. They follow as I run upstairs and drop some trinkets near the bed, then they block the stairs as I try to leave, while Angeline chants "You need to leave. You need to leave." I finally manage to maneuver past the guards and back onto the street. I make it into Bits and Pieces, leave an enchanted axe on the bed, and run into a massive crowd of guards by the door. There are so many soldiers I can't force my way past them. As Santa, I've only played the main quest as far as Dragonsreach, so I don't have a Fus Roh Ho Ho Ho Dah shout to blast them out of my way. I'm stuck! Desperate, I summon Rudolph, whose giant fat butt creates enough of a gap in the guards for me to squeeze through to the door.

There are now a dozen guards after me. After a few more quick deliveries to the remaining stores, my Santa speed takes me to the other end of the city quickly enough for the guards to lose sight of me, and I get to make a few deliveries in relative peace. I hit a few homes, drop a ton of loot in the extensive Bard's College, and visit Styrr in the Hall of the Dead, all without incident.

And I In My Cap

Then I head to the Blue Palace, where the guards immediately attempt an arrest again. Unfortunately, this time I accidentally pick the "Pay my bounty" option. This means they confiscate any stolen goods I've got. I've bought all my gifts legitimately, but I do have one stolen item: my Santa hat, since I "stole" it from the barrel in Dragonsreach. They unceremoniously strip it from me. My Santa hat! My festive lid! Gone! I'm deeply upset.

My giving mood has been spiked, and I start leaving charcoal for everyone else in Solitude. I'm pleased to see that charcoal comes in sticks, and those sticks look like poo, which feels fitting for these ungrateful citizens. Outside the city, even Rudolph isn't feeling cooperative: when I summon him, he appears on a ledge out of reach. I leave him there and run to the stables and farms outside Solitude on foot.

I then fly off to Mor Khazgur, an orc stronghold. We arrive with Rudolph sporting an arrow in his face due to us passing too close to a few angry bandits with no Christmas cheer but plenty of good aim.

The orcs are not thrilled to see me bursting into their longhouse and crashing around, dropping loot by their beds, but despite several stern threats they never get violent. A half-hour into my trip, I visit Dragon Bridge, then arrive in Falkreath at 8:40. They welcome me with open arms. Open arms that shoot flames and ice bolts. Someone even summons a ghost dog to attack me. Does real Santa have to put up with this crap?

I've hated Falkreath even before tonight: it sports a confusing multi-level layout that makes it hard to find doors that you can see on the map. Now I've also come to hate its easily-angered residents. Still, by 8:52, we're out of there, having either visited everyone or perhaps gotten sick of trying to visit everyone while surrounded by angry guards and wizards. Rudolph is having major problems by this point, crashing to earth every few seconds while in flight, meaning we're constantly being attacked on the ground by Forsworn, bandits, wolves, and sabre cats. No one seems happy to see Santa tonight!

Well, the first leg of my trip didn't go well. But at least that means things can't go worse, right?

Things go worse. Next time, on Serial. Continue to Part 3.