Our favourite Christmas presents!

It’s been a few weeks since Christmas now, and just enough time to see which presents have been one-hit wonders, and which will be well-used and much-loved. Thankfully, not much has dive-bombed and been dropped in a box to be forgotten forever – a few of the silly little stocking fillers maybe, but nothing big from under the tree has been a failure. Phew!

We didn’t go too overboard but there were a few big treats, many of which used Christmas money from family to fund.

Georgiana

Georgie’s favourite present is without a doubt Super Mario Maker* for the Wii U, which she played with at EGX and has wanted ever since… months after the show we walked into Game and she made a beeline for it exclaiming “this is the one I want for Christmas,” much to the amusement & shock of the shop assistant. She may be a little four year old girl, but she’s a little geeky gamer just like her parents! 

Almost every day since we installed it, Georgie has played on it at least a little, and it is a great way for her to be creative, have fun, and even practise her pen control! She loves to create levels for everyone else to play and makes them the appropriate difficulty level for her target – some of the levels she has made for me & James have been really hard! Levels for Lydia have no bad guys; just things to collect and some jumping… on her last one she even put in a flight of stairs for Mario to go up to the top of the flagpole at the end, so Lydia would get the 1up reward.

That’s not to say Georgie didn’t love her other gifts too – especially all the Lego she ended up getting!

Lydia

Little Lydie doesn’t really have one stand-out favourite gift; she has been having fun with all of them. VTech Toot-Toot Racing Rampway* we gave her was a big hit, and she has also been loving the Orchard Toys games the girls were given. Her Grandfather gave her the Shopping List games with both expansion packs so we have played that a lot – and Lydia is so good! She is really great at memory games.  

James

James had a birthday as well at Christmas, so I used it as an excuse to give him a whole pile of random but useful things… a multi-tool for his bike, a gadget cleaning kit, that sort of thing. The girls and I also went a bit R2-D2 mad, he ended up with a pez, USB-powered desktop vacuum cleaner, and a noisy keyring torch, all little versions of the loveable droid.

He got three bigger presents though and he has been enjoying them all. For his birthday I got him a quadcopter (I did a lot of research and found this Revell Rayvore* one that is affordable and “family-friendly” aka tough enough for kids to handle). At Christmas I gave James and the girls a Mario Kart Carrera Go* set and they have all loved that; the girls are surprisingly great at controlling the cars and I go flying off the track more than them.

The third gift he has loved has been a set of Hornby model train engine & trucks which I got for him to be able to use his new track all year round – I also bought him the first expansion pack, and he has purchased the second one with some of the Christmas money we got, along with some pins – he has big plans about making a train table/board to be used on top of the kitchen table!  

Me

As for me, it’s obvious what my favourite gift was – LEGO Dimensions* for the PS4! I fell in love with it at EGX when I got to play with it before it’s release date, and I just knew that I was going to have to get it. A lot of my Christmas gifts revolved around it – I got several of the level packs and fun packs, and also spent some of our Christmas money on some more – it’s got to keep me going till my birthday in July.

I’m being quite good and playing through the story mode with the main three characters & vehicle first, then I am going to go back and explore all the extra levels and adventure worlds I have access to, and replay the story levels to get as much as I can. I’m a completionist and have got platinum trophies for all but one of my lego games (and I’m still working on Pirates of the Caribbean – I had to restart it), so I am going to get a LOT of play time out of Dimensions. I highly recommend it to any Lego game fan. 

*this post contains amazon affiliate links for your convenience.

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