Around the World: Christmas

Around the World: Christmas takes the engine, movement, and level layout of its direct predecessor and dusts a faint layer of white pixels over the screen.

Slapping a festive coat of paint on a budget frame

By late 1999, tiny shareware creators and budget developers were looking for any fast way to turn around seasonal releases before the decade closed. If you already had a basic 2D side-scrolling engine sitting on your hard drive, the path of least resistance was taking your existing assets and tweaking a few art palettes. That is exactly how TMB Productions brought Around the World: Christmas into the late-era DOS market, trading warm ground tiles for snowy caps while keeping the underlying logic untouched.

If you played the original title, the moment you spawn into this holiday variant you will recognize every single mechanical quirk. You steer your sprite across simple platforms, jump over gaps, and try to navigate side-view hazard setups that feel completely unchanged from the base game. It is the exact same half-ass platformer as Around the World, only now it is snowing across your display.

How Around the World: Christmas handles on screen

The core gameplay relies on simple side-view jumping where momentum feels slightly off from the moment you hit a direction key. Platforming demands exact landing spots, yet your character slides just enough upon touching down to pull you off small ledges into danger zones. It creates an unnecessary layer of friction in simple jump sequences that should be straightforward.

Enemy placement relies heavily on blocking narrow corridors, forcing you to time tedious back-and-forth patterns rather than encouraging fluid movement through a stage. The visual update means white pixels drop across the foreground, which often makes tracking small enemy projectiles or edge boundaries needlessly difficult against the bright backdrop. It is an obscure piece of late DOS software, fitting right into the broader category of action games from that transition year.

Minimal sound and basic visual design

Audio is kept to absolute bare-bones PC speaker or standard AdLib squeaks, featuring basic chirps for jump inputs and short blips when picking up items. There is no festive soundtrack or rich audio work here to sell the winter atmosphere, just the same raw audio triggers reused from earlier builds. The palette shift is genuinely the entire premise, trading brown earth tones for stark whites and blues.

The visuals stick strictly to side-scrolling 2D, built from blocky, repeating grid tiles. While other budget developers in 1999 were experimenting with full 3D software rendering or detailed VGA art, this title stays firmly rooted in cheap platforming habits that felt old long before the late nineties arrived.

Predictable design flaws and cheap level layouts

The absolute worst habit of this release is placing hazards right at the edge of the scrolling boundary. Because the screen camera remains tight on your character, jumping blindly into a blind drop frequently drops you straight onto a hazard before the tile even renders into full view. That lack of screen real estate turns simple progression into trial-and-error memorization.

Instead of designing clever level mechanics or unique power-ups, difficulty is pushed entirely onto tight jump tolerances and blind spots. You end up playing cautiously, creeping toward the edge of every screen boundary rather than running at full speed. It slows down what ought to be a quick arcade run into a frustrating crawl through recycled level design.

Try this piece of DOS history right in your browser

This release shows how quick-turnaround budget games worked at the tail end of the MS-DOS era. It does not offer complex mechanics or polished platforming, but if you want to see how obscure shareware authors pumped out seasonal reskins, it makes for a weird afternoon distraction. You can jump in to see the snowy graphics and test the loose physics controls for yourself without hassle.

You can play Around the World: Christmas online, free, right here in your browser, with nothing to install and no setup required. Launch the game directly on this page, duck under the falling snow pixels, and see how far you can make it through the icy platforms before a blind drop catches you off guard.