The Daily App: Count Down the Days 'Til Christmas
Counting down the days to Christmas can be agony, but that's why Advent calendars were invented, giving out a series of small treats leading up to the big shebang.
Advent calendars are a charming holiday tradition -- many people fondly remember opening up the little windows every day to see a tiny new holiday tableau leading up to Christmas. This year, app fans and addicts have a particular treat: an Advent calendar app just for them, offering a free app a day in December leading up to Christmas.
What's the App?
Magic Solver created "Advent 2012: 25 Christmas Apps," offering an Advent calendar that packages 25 mini-activities with links to 25 other free apps. So far this month, free linked apps include a fantastic bubble popping game and a Christmas farm simulation game. The smaller mini-games involves decorating a Christmas tree as fast as you can, capturing the treats let loose from a New Year's popper and snapping up the pieces of a broken Christmas cookie. The mini-games aren't extensive, but they're pleasant diversions, and the holiday theme is well-executed, putting you in the spirit of the season.
Like all things Yuletide, there's plenty of colorful festive graphics and aggressively cheerful music (that you can thankfully silence). The Advent calendar view itself is an intricately animated warm and cozy fireside scene. As a whole, the app is not particularly sophisticated, but it's a lot of fun, and it's the perfect holiday diversion for an app fan who loves to fill up on cheap, free, fun apps to keep themselves entertained.
You'll Want It If --
You love free games and want to go beyond the usual suspects, or you just want an Advent calendar for the digital age. Or you just absolutely love holiday stuff in all shapes and forms, and want every nook and cranny of your life -- including your precious iOS device storage space -- decked out in the Christmas spirit.
It's Not My Thing, What Else Ya Got?
There are plenty of Advent apps in many flavors. More kid-appropriate Advent calendars include the Advent calendar by Bacarox Studios, which functions much more like traditional calendars: you tap on a number corresponding to the date and it offers a tiny animated graphic, complete with sound. It's very simple, but nice for small children, and is the digital equivalent of a colorful Advent calendar card that charmed so many of us as kids.
For those of you who are altogether tired of mistletoe, wreaths, Christmas lights and general holiday madness, the Cthulhu Christmas Calendar by Red Wasp offers a fun, if rather ghoulish, alternative -- it takes the familiar iconography and characters of Christmas but applies a macabre, weird twist. Santa, mistletoe, Christmas trees get mashed up with the dark imagery and creatures of cult horror writer H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, a horrific, sinister fictional universe which features "a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth and who have since fallen into a deathlike sleep," according to Wikipedia.
Each day in the calendar has a Cthulhu-related question to puzzle over and answer, as well as a strange, surreal new graphic of a Lovecraftian entity with a Yule twist. (Think weirdly tentacled creatures with candy canes and Santa hats.) It's a perfect Advent calendar for horror and sci-fi fans, and of course, admirers of Lovecraft -- a perfect "nightmare before Christmas," if you just need an antidote to relentless assaults of holiday cheer. ♦
Categories: Entertainment | The Daily App
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