Review by ZX KNIGHT on 05 Apr 2012 (Rating: 3)
A nice idea that would probably seem a bit odd nowadays, this Xmas Card by Your Sinclair magazine was a type-in program where you typed in the code and then ran it to display the Xmas card.
It explains why the image is pretty basic but I can imagine that back in the day I’d have happily spent a couple of hours typing it all up to see the results and feeling pretty pleased with myself.
Now of course we can fire it up through an emulator in seconds and the lack of a sense of achievements rather defeats the point. However at the time you could write in your own Xmas message giving you the opportunity to tape your own card to give to friends, which would have been unbelievably cool (to me at least), even if your friends would resent sitting in front of their TV waiting for the damn card to load.
In this respect it offers something quite unique (ignoring all the other type-in cards that were put on covertapes) but obviously it’s a feature unavailable through the emulator. I guess with the Kinect you could probably have some form of Microsoft Kincectmas card program where you film yourself onto an existing template.
Actually that’s not a bad idea…I’ll have to remember to tweet it to some Xbox twitterati and make space in my living room for the inevitable free Kinect reward.
The Your Sinclair Xmas Card is a nice little program for the time, but without the type-in instructions is a bit pointless today, especially when viewed on an emulator.
Taken from: http://zombiesatemyxbox.com/2011/12/27/the-retro-review-10-zx-christmas-classics-and-curios/
