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The Giant Snowglobe - 1.1

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This is The Giant Snowglobe!
In this Holiday 2020 (I guess 2021 now?) Mod Contest entry, with nothing to do with the Giant Toilet, play as Santa Claus inside this massive globe and keep the Christmas spirit alive by doing deeds to make Christmas the best it can possibly be!

Return presents, get rid of all evil doers, and maintain stability by ridding of all other holidays, because Christmas is the only one that matters.



Wasps?
No, Santa Doges!

Why?
Why not?

Collect all 7 candy canes and reveal mod development info! Activate all 3 gags!



Buy all 3 alternate costumes for Santa! They all have something... unique about them.



Buy the new vehicle from ol' festive Gil near the black skyscrapers!


[deleted user]
3 yrs ago (Statistics)
How do you manage to create that many stuff within a short timespan? This is ridiculously amazing! 👀
Really, flawless work! Can't even imagine how many effort that took
Simply random and lots of Christmasy vibes.
Nothing much to say other than, I loved it, the environment, the voice of Santa (so silly yet funny and matching a lot). Very cute mod overall and entertaining.
Good job on it! 😜
Wow, Nightbane! You really know how to keep things secret and revealing them unexpectedly! This really caught me off guard.
Update: 1.1 is out!

Changes:
  • New track for mission 6 due to previous track being copyrighted.
  • Optimizations.
Absolutely wonderful mod that was a great way to cap off 2020 and redeem some of the last month of that year! I'd actually go as far to say that I enjoyed it even more so than the previous contest entry (SkeleTown), which I already adored. A lot of my praises towards the mod also end up applying here, so this might not turn out to be as long as my previous review.

A lot of my praises towards SkeleTown also apply to here. The mod's depiction of Santa doesn't really favor any appearence from the Simpsons television show despite the yellow skin, but there manages to be a lot of character depicted solely from the model's design and the voice clips from Happy Wheels used. Much in the same way Skelly tickled my funny bone. (Come on, it's still kinda funny to make bone jokes.) One key difference is the introduction of the Elf NPCs who have dialog that isn't in Skeleton to give the context to each missions, and a couple of the gags relating to their obsession with Christmas (such as the Elf School one) got a nice chuckle out of me. It did also make the gag where one of the Elves broke character even funnier, and I'm not talking about the one who stole the wrapping paper.

The town itself took what SkeleTown did but somehow does it even better. While I found SkeleTown's design was clever with how it handled landmarks and region coding, some building areas felt a little tight in terms of breathing room and the Horror theme resulted in landmarks feeling kinda abstract. Giant Snowglobe feels a lot more open, so it's much easier to quickly see a region in the distance and drive over to it than it was in SkeleTown. Not that SkeleTown's map was super difficult to navigate, but I feel the player had to get a 'sense' of the map first before they could recognize what region they were in before moving onwards. That wasn't the case here and I could get a 'feel' for the area before even going there, if that makes sense. The mod also breaks away from the Christmas theme here and there for some inside jokes (saw Tappie's old avatar lying on the bed and I'm being blessed as Tim Allen watches over me) compared to SkeleTown, which honestly gives the mod a lot of personality for me in addition to the Christmas theme. It works nicely for a one off Level made for a competition.

Collectibles are handled much better than what they were in SkeleTown. The Flying Doge heads with their nonchalant screams of death are hidden in fairly logical areas and I never really had an instance where I acidentally killed one while just driving around, which is an issue that popped up during SkeleTown for me a couple of times. Instead, the Doge Heads feel like they're tucked away in just the right areas of the map, rewarding exploration by checking an area you can wedge Santa and his car into. It would've been insanely easy to simply hide one of the Doge Heads in one of the farther corners of the map, but instead if I was missing one, I was simply overlooking an area near one of the populated districts I hadn't properly checked. I got 100% in the mod and had an absolute blast with it.

Spoiler
I don't really have much to critcize that wasn't present in the original SkeleTown except that I almost feel the difficulty with the earlier missions is a bit higher than the ones in the late game missions. While I do think the showdown with Skelly herself is a nice callback to the previous mod and it manages to avoid the 'boxed in' scenario from the previous mod by using a circle for the arena, I kinda wish Skelly had an extra trick up her sleeve here or there since a lot of the stage still feels as if it relies on the player exploiting the AI to defeat her. A small stage where Santa just like throws her off the edge of the map or kicks her might have made it feel a little more impactful (thought very brutal for her?).

So yeah, pretty much SkeleTown but it improves upon the design flaws with the map design and collectibles I had with the previous mod, so I think I slightly prefer this one. Well done!