Here's a fun little holiday timewaster for kids of all ages: Nintendo's got an advent calendar game, Mission In Snowdriftland: one new level opens every day through the 24th of December, but you can play all the previous levels up to the current day.
It's a classic platform game, starring a little snowman who runs and jumps through the levels, catching snowflakes and trying to catch a bad guy by retrieving stolen data. The graphics are reminiscent of the good old days before game characters grew tits that would be realistic if they weren't so freakishly huge, and before game systems became something grown men called in sick to their jobs and camped out for a week to buy and resell for thousands of dollars on eBay. And it's really well done, too.
Well...the introduction and level one are really well done, anyway; I suck at games and can't get any farther than that. But, after naptime I'm going to sit the four-year-old in front of the keyboard and see if the rest of the levels up to today's are any good.
(Update: Levels two through six are pretty cool, too. The four year old is taking a snack break before tackling level seven. Her little sister had a great time just watching and cheering us on.)
Even taking my game suckage into account, this is a hell of a lot more fun than opening a cardboard door and getting a piece of cheap, stale chocolate every day for twenty-four days.
