By Drew Wilson
There have been many iterations of Home Alone. This includes various video games such as this one that was released on the Super Nintendo. We look to see if this was a good port.
The Home Alone movie was a huge hit in the 90’s. As such, there was a lot of franchise that went by the same name. One spinoff of the movie was an action video game that was released to the SNES. It was released in 1991.
Like most games based off the Home Alone series, the focus is on the best part of the movies – the burglars and the boobie traps. Kevin must defend the house against the burglars who are trying to rob the place.
You start off with a squirt gun which can temporarily stun most of the burglars in the game. Your objective is to go through the two floors on each level and take all the valuables before the burglars do. You have a backpack that can only hold a certain number of valuables. Once you have filled your backpack (or you decide to strategically do the drop early), you must find the laundry chute and drop everything down into the basement.
The valuables can be found on top of shelves, inside drawers and behind objects like mirrors. Either way, you must drop down the chute the designated target number of valuables. Once you have completed that task, you must go to the large brown door. A key will magically appear in front of it so you can unlock it and run down into the basement. When you get to the basement, you’ll be treated with an obstacle course of enemies before facing off with a boss critter. You have to hit the loose block and make it land on the boss a certain number of times to defeat it. Once that is done, you continue to where you dropped the valuables off and push it all into the oversized safe and lock it all up.
Where this game shines the most is… well… I don’t really know. There’s numerous burglars roaming the house which is unlike the movie (there was only two), the boss stages have you fighting with spiders (sure, that was in the movie, but as a protagonist), rats (where were they in the movie) and ghosts (isn’t this a Christmas related game???). There was the BB gun which was featured in the movie, but the main weapon is a squirt gun. How that was based off of the movie? I don’t really know. You can collect pizza for health which was a good show of creativity, but the boobie traps typically consists of a heavy object you have to trigger yourself or something sitting on the floor.
There is the pictures that were taken from the movie, but the implementation mostly gave the game a crude comic book feel to it. It was like there were a few screen shots taken from the movie and speech bubbles were hastily put on them.
If you thought the storyline of the movie was poorly written, this game will make the first half of the movie seem brilliantly written. Seeing “boy those guys won’t give up”, “Oh no, dad said our pets are expensive”, and “well, I guess I stopped them. Hey, what’s that noise? Mom!” was like nails on chalkboard to me.
The only thing going for this game is that it does provide some challenge to the player, but that’s pretty much it.
Graphically, you could almost pull the same stuff off on a regular Nintendo. If you further compressed the pictures, I’m betting you could fit this game on a NES graphically speaking. There really isn’t much there to praise the game for in this department.
The music was quite bland. The “Dance of the Sugar Plumb Fairies” did make an appearance in this game, but that’s pretty much it. There were some sound clips in this game like the famous Kevin scream and him screaming “Yes!” when you beat one of the four levels, but beyond that, the sounds were quite touch and go.
Overall, if you want to play a video game based off of the Home Alone movie, this game will probably be a disappointment. There’s passing resemblances and connections to the movie, but that’s pretty much it. There’s even more things added to the game that doesn’t even make any sense as far as the movie is concerned. There’s plenty of great games out there that were released in this era and this just isn’t one of them.
Overall
Furthest point in game: Beat the game and put Harry and Marve behind bars.
General gameplay: 8/25
Replay value: 1/10
Graphics: 3/10
Audio: 2/5
Overall rating: 28%
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85
