'Tis the Season To Be Gory Trivia Quiz

Answer: Batman

Released in October 2011 for the PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles, "Batman: Arkham City" was the follow-up to "Batman: Arkham Asylum", and the second instalment in the "Arkhamverse" series of games. After the events of "Arkham Asylum", Gotham City's new mayor has transformed its slums into a giant prison known as Arkham City. Batman is imprisoned in the city by its corrupt warden and infected by the same disease afflicting Joker, who has also contaminated Gotham's blood supply. The caped crusader must explore the streets of Arkham City in a race against time to save himself and countless other innocent victims.

On normal days, a visit to supervillain Calendar Man in the Solomon Wayne Courthouse jail yields nothing much of interest, but talking to him on certain holidays will get him to tell you all about the crimes he committed on that particular day. Doing this on all 12 holidays (New Year's Day, Valentine's Day, Saint Patrick's Day, April Fools' Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Independence Day, the Feast Day of Saint Roch, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Day) also unlocks the Storyteller achievement. Calendar Man's Christmas double murder involves him killing a street corner Santa for his suit so that he can sneak into the Christmas Eve party of Judge Harkness, Gotham's hanging judge, and strangle him with his own Christmas lights. As Calendar Man recounts: "The cops found him later, hanging from the elaborate light display of his own roof. Judgie almost looked like a cartoon himself alongside the comical reindeer, elves, and snowmen. I called that murder my 'Christmas Special'." Festive!

Answer: Nuke Santa

"DEFCON" was released by Introversion for PC and Mac in 2006/7, and on Linux in 2012, and featured a global simulation of all-out nuclear war. The game gave players control over a territory with a population of 100 million and counted down from DEFCON-5 to DEFCON-1, moving irreversibly towards mutually-assured destruction. A 2011 Easter egg on Steam gave players a break from the usual carnage by placing Santa himself in the game map. Players had to wait for DEFCON-1 and launch a nuclear warhead at Santa, ending Christmas once and for all for everyone.

Some Stanford University students took the Christmas theme even further with their Christmas mod of "DEFCON", which saw missile silos replaced with Christmas trees, surface-to-air missile replaced with snowmen, stealth bombers replaced with reindeer-drawn sleighs, and the game's usual somber music replaced with Christmas carols. Instead of nuclear warheads, players delivered presents to cities on behalf of Santa to the sound of cheering, happy children. And if all that sweetness became too tiresome, you could always go back to the normal game and just nuke Santa (again).

Answer: Krampus

"The Darkside Detective" was released for PC and Mac in July 2017. It follows Detective Francis McQueen, "the sole member of the criminally underfunded Darkside Division", who together with his loyal partner Officer Dooley takes on cases involving the spooky and occult in Twin Lakes City.

A December 2017 update added a new case called "Buy Hard", which saw McQueen and Dooley travel to Twin Lakes Mall on Christmas Eve for some last-minute shopping. There, they pay a visit to Santa's Grotto and learn that the evil Krampus has replaced Santa Claus and turned the children into gnomes. Our intrepid officers have to work fast to save the day. They discover that Krampus is lactose intolerant, so they feed him a batch of cookies soaked in some milk that they stole from an eggnog stall. Krampus blows up and floats away, and McQueen follows the vent behind the grotto to find Santa tied up in the boiler room. They use Santa's magic dust to transform the gnomes back into children and make their police car fly, so that it can power Santa's sleigh in place of his reindeer, who were wheel-clamped outside the mall for loitering. Our heroes rescue Santa just in time for him to deliver 1.9 billion gifts to children around the world. Christmas is saved!

Answer: Call of Duty

"Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare" was released in November 2007 for the PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles, and on PC. The "Modern Warfare" instalment of this first-person shooter was so-called because it was the first instalment to leave behind the WWII theme in favor of a more modern setting. The original "Crash" map featured an unnamed desert town in the Middle East populated with abandoned cars, war-torn buildings, and a crashed CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter in the center of the town. The "Winter Crash" map featured the same layout as the "Crash" map, with a few significant changes. The original afternoon setting was changed to nighttime, and the original desert sandscape was replaced with a wintry, snow-covered landscape occasionally dotted with giant candy canes. Festive lights and decorations adorned the trees and buildings, and the crashed helicopter was now accompanied by a giant Christmas tree, complete with presents at the bottom. The best change? Airstrikes in "Winter Crash" were accompanied by jingling bells and Santa yelling "Ho, ho, ho!" or "Merry Christmas!", and the bombs dropped by the planes took the form of Christmas presents.

Initially, the "Winter Crash" map could only be downloaded for the PC and Mac versions of "Call of Duty 4", but was subsequently included in the December 2016 update for "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered".

Answer: Cocaine

"Payday 2" was released in August 2013 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and featured 12 original heists and numerous additional missions in the form of downloadable content. The "White Xmas" mission released in December 2014 had players being recruited by contractor Vlad to locate his drunk Bosnian-Norwegian brother-in-law who crashed the plane carrying a consignment of pure Colombian cocaine hidden in Christmas presents. Players had to escort Vlad's brother-in-law to a pickup location, while evading capture by law enforcement and recovering as much of the loot as they could. And you thought your holiday season was stressful.

Subsequent holiday heists kept to the Christmas theme. The 2015 Christmas heist "Santa's Workshop" involved targeting a Christmas-themed drug distribution point populated by "elves" (bikers dressed up in Christmas costumes) packing "presents" (bags of cocaine). The 2015 Christmas heist "Stealing Xmas" required players to again provide assistance to Vlad's drunk brother-in-law, who disguised himself as a mall Santa to smuggle a shipment of drugs through a shopping center. The heist ended when the loot was brought back to the mall's Christmas tree, which was then airlifted through a broken skylight by a helicopter.

Answer: Crimbo

In "Kingdom of Loathing", you play as a stick figure adventurer exploring the kingdom and earning meat (the game's currency) and other items through the completion of quests and the vanquishing of monsters, like cunning knob goblin accountants, disgusting nacho golems, and dangerous break-dancers.

Since its inception in 2003, the game has featured a special holiday-themed season each December called "Crimbo" that bears a remarkable resemblance to Christmas. As the game itself notes, "Crimbo is the one holiday in the Kingdom of Loathing that doesn't occur at a fixed date on the Loathing calendar. Its origins are shrouded in mystery (and, let's be honest, a peppermint-schnapps-fueled haze), but it generally involves a guy in a red, fur-trimmed suit and hat handing out presents to everyone. It's probably some kind of tax dodge."

The first couple of Crimbo seasons saw the distribution of Crimbo pressies and Crimbo stockings to all players, before evolving into an advent calendar with daily gifts. Over the years, the game has built up a remarkably elaborate storyline around Uncle Crimbo, the "no-good, alcoholic, shiftless layabout" brother of the original Father Crimbo, who perished from a heart attack. The increasingly bizarre take on the classic Christmas story has involved Uncle Crimbo's adventures with Linnea, the "rightful monarch of Halloween", the Penguin Mafia (apparently a thing), and the Crimborg, a reanimated Father Crimbo cyborg. Because Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without a cyborg version of Santa.

Answer: Grand Theft Auto

While the game has attracted criticism for its depiction of violence and misogyny, that hasn't dampened its popularity. "Grand Theft Auto V" was released in September 2013 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles, and set the record for the fastest-selling entertainment product in history. The following month, Rockstar Games also launched "Grand Theft Auto Online", the game's online multiplayer mode. Downloadable content was made available for the online version throughout the year, with special holiday content around Christmas each year.

For 2013, the "Holiday Gifts" update provided players with free Christmas apparel, discounted cars and gear, and snowfall over the normally sunny fictional settings of Los Santos and Blaine County, San Andreas. Subsequent "Festive Surprise" updates saw Rockstar step up their game, adding new features to the previous year's content, like new vehicles and tattoos, Christmas trees in players' apartments, the ability to engage in snowball fights, exclusive gear and weapons, holiday pajamas, and - wait for it - ugly Christmas sweaters. The snowfall in San Andreas also began occurring for longer periods each year - let's call it yet another casualty of global warming (you heard it here first).

Answer: Gary Busey

The follow-up to 2009's "Killing Floor", "Killing Floor 2" was released in November 2016 for PC and the PlayStation 4 console. The gameplay involved players fighting against waves of zombie-like enemies known as Zeds. The sequel followed the original game's tradition of holding annual holiday-themed events known as "Twisted Christmas", which featured special Christmas-themed maps and achievements. "Killing Floor 2" continued in the same vein, adding a "Krampus Lair" map in December 2017 that pit players against Krampus, who corrupted Santa's elves to his cause and claimed Christmas for himself. The game took things even further in 2018 with the introduction of a twisted version of Santa himself as a playable character. I can't do better than the game's own description:

"In the year since the Krampus Christmas, Santa Claus has dedicated himself to avenging his fallen workers, friends, and family. Gone are the rosy cheeks and the belly like a bowl full of jelly, replaced with a permanent scowl and muscle layered on muscle. There will be no silent night this holiday season; this year, Santa Claus is all out of goodwill and Christmas cheer. He only has seething rage, revenge, and a vast quantity of ammunition with which to ring in the holidays."

Santa was voiced by actor Gary Busey, who is best known for playing the villain in "Lethal Weapon", Special Agent Peter Keyes in "Predator 2", and the title role in "The Buddy Holly Story", which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in 1979.

Answer: Santa's corpse

"Angry Video Game Nerd" began life in 2004 as an online game review series hosted by filmmaker and critic James Rolfe, the self-proclaimed nerd. In each episode, the Nerd reviews different retro games that are infamous for being poorly made or particularly difficult or frustrating. The series grew into a successful YouTube channel and even spawned its own video game "Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures". The game, which launched on Steam in 2013 and later on Wii U and Nintendo 3DS, saw the Nerd and his friends trapped in a bad video game (how meta), and was chock-full of parodies and references to the games reviewed in the web series.

One level of "AVGN Adventures" had the Nerd battling evil reindeer and snowmen in a Christmas-themed North Pole setting. At one stage, the Nerd faced Old Saint Nick himself, who hurled exploding presents at him until dispatched by the Nerd's trusty Nintendo Zapper. The Nerd then proceeded to snowboard down a mountain on Santa's bloody corpse. A new yuletide tradition? You tell me.

Answer: The Dawning

"Destiny 2" was released in September 2017 for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and on PC a month later. The follow-up to "Destiny" saw the last survivors of the human race observing a year-end tradition known as "The Dawning", which was an amalgamation of various holiday observances from before the Collapse. The first instalment of the Dawning, which took place between December 19, 2017 and January 9, 2018, introduced snowball fights as part of game play. The 2018 instalment of the Dawning took things even further, with Guardians tasked with slaying alien foes to harvest ingredients for use in baking delicious holiday treats. Say what?

Guardians had to complete various tasks, which usually involved killing enemies of different races in different ways, to collect the ingredients needed to make a variety of baked goods with memorable names like Gjallardoodles, Chocolate Ship Cookies, Telemetry Tapioca, and Infinite Forest Cake. So you would run out and kill some Hive enemies to get some Chitin Powder, which you could then use to make Alkane Dragée Cookies or Javelin Mooncakes. But be careful - using the wrong combination of ingredients produced something unpalatable known as Burnt Edge Transits. The finished treats were given out to various non-player characters who would reward you with exclusive weapons and gear. Because the true meaning of the Dawning is all about baked goods and the spirit of giving... and vanquishing your enemies with rocket launchers and machine guns. So that's what "The Great British Bake-Off" has been missing.