Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams... (Saturn) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Sega's 1996 Christmas-themed Sega Saturn game, Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams....

Christmas NiGHTS was given away in December 1996 as a promotional sampler disc, but goes far, far above and beyond expectations for a "demo."

I absolutely love NiGHTS into Dreams, and the Christmas edition is just as awesome, offering all sorts of stuff that isn't in the full game at all, most of which has never been included with the game's updates and rereleases.

The gameplay is exactly the same as the arcadey high score chasing style in the original. It's fun whether your great or terrible at it, and for as relaxing as it is if you just want to chill with a laid back game, it can also be incredibly difficult to play it well. That's what makes it so addictive, though.

The first Claris stage is used, but Elliot can also be played with an entirely new layout based on Claris's original.

BTW, what kind of name is Claris? Seriously, did someone at Sega like Apple products that much?

The game, depending on the time of year that you play the CD, will change things up quite a bit as well. From November to January the entire game will take on a winter theme (the game calls it Winter NiGHTS), Christmas decorations show up, and you'll get different weather patterns in the game depending on what time of the day you are playing. In this video, the time is set so that the Northern Lights are showing.

When you play on Christmas, Santa joins in, everyone is wearing Santa clothes, and you get jazzy Christmas song remixes for the background music. The boss also now has a snazzy Christmas face-lift. There are a few other things that change on New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, and April 1st.

There is also a massive gallery of unlockables, with all sorts of cool concept art galleries, mini-games, karaoke, promo videos, sound tests - lots of stuff. I've included some of those things - check out the time codes below.

The best of these unlockables has to be Sonic the Hedgehog NiGHTS into Dreams. It's a straight up 3D Sonic platformer that uses the same stage as is in the Claris and Elliot modes, but Sonic can't fly, and so runs about at high-speeds on the ground. It's pretty awesome - even if the camera constantly gets in the way and gauging depth is near impossible, it's a good glimpse of one potential route Sonic could have gone if he ever had had a full-blown 3D platformer on the Saturn. I'm playing with the Saturn date set to Christmas, so Sonic joins in the festivites, coming complete with a themed boss in the form of Santa Robotnik.

Time Codes:
3:21 Claris playthrough begins
10:46 Elliot playthrough begins
17:06 Ending
19:04 Credits w/acapella version of NiGHTS theme
23:55 Sonic NiGHTS into Dreams playthrough begins
31:21 Bonus video - '96 Tokyo Toy Show Edition Movie
36:36 Bonus video - '96 Summer Special Edition Movie
38:46 Karaoke mode, Dreams Dreams

And as you can see from the options menu, NiGHTS (both this version and the regular one) feature widescreen modes. Since the Saturn obviously cannot output any specific widescreen signal, the video must be stretched manually (using the television's controls to stretch the image horizontally to fill the width of a widescreen back in the 90s). It's a really cool and rarely seen feature in games from the 32-bit era of consoles, and it works quite well here.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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