Welcome to another edition of Playing With Power. The review article that looks at all things Nintendo Entertainment System. It’s surprising what franchises can get video games, especially in the era of the great grey box. For example, we’ve seen games based on everything from Domino’s pizza to Where’s Waldo get 8-Bit renditions. So it’s not too surprising when a popular family comedy from the 90’s would get a port on the NES. This week we look at Home Alone? Does it have the tools to be a great game, or is it, as the French call, “les incompetents”?
YEAR OF RELEASE: 1991
PUBLISHER: THQ
GENRE: Action
Home Alone was a 1990 family comedy that launched the career of child star McCaulay Culkin. The movie was a massive success, making a worldwide box office gross of over 400 million. It was a massive hit, and has become a staple of the holiday season. And of course, since it was a hit, that of course led to a video game adaptation.
THQ, a company that was starting to earn its name by the tail end of the 90’s picked up the rights to publish games based on the Home Alone franchise. THQ to me is a company that I find worse than LJN. With most LJN games, at least they have a semblance of solid control, and fun gameplay. THQ? Not so much. Didn’t help matters that most of their early games were forgettable Fox Kids cartoons like Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and Peter Pan and the Pirates.
An interesting note about Home Alone was that it was actually developed by Bethesda Softworks. Yes, the same Bethesda that would give us the Fallout and Elder Scrolls franchises. But did a future big video game company have the tools to make a solid movie game? Let’s find out.
COVER STORY
It’s the movie poster, so it definitely works in that regard as an eye catcher. Similar to LJN, THQ was notorious with using movie posters for their boxes, and it sorta worked. Nonetheless, if you liked the movie poster, you’ll like this cover. If you’ll like the contents within the box, that’s a whole other story.
STORY
Kevin McCallister is a young boy who, after a slip up by his parents, is accidentally left Home Alone during the holidays. But that becomes the least of his problems when he discovers that a pair of crooks known as the “Wet Bandits” are robbing the neighbourhood, and have their eyes on Kevin’s home. It’s Kevin’s house, and he has to defend it. Can he survive long enough until the cops arrive?
GAMEPLAY
Home Alone is a one player action game. You control Kevin McCallister as he has to defend his home from the wet bandits, Marv and Harry. You move Kevin with the D-Pad, from left and right, and can climb with the up and down. Kevin picks up traps with the A button, and can drop them with the B.
The object to victory is to keep the Wet Bandits from capturing you for 20 minutes when the Police arrive. If they capture you, it’s an instant game over. You can keep track of your remaining time by pressing the start button. It also keeps track of any traps you drop on the ground, and the locations of of Kevin, as well as Marv and Harry.
The game is one whole area, that being the McCallister house. It is five levels wide, three floors of the house, the front yard, and the basement. You can traverse up the stairs, and even up the pipe on the side of the house to go around the building. There’s also Kevin’s tree house with a rope you can use to climb into the third floor. Get well acquainted with the building, because you’ll have to go through it a lot in the game.
You can pick up three traps at a time, can cycle through with the select, and drop them whenever you feel. Each trap has a different picture on them, representing certain traps from the movie like the paint cans, the tarantula, the nails, or the christmas lights. Despite the different pictures, they all do the same effect, which is knock down the crook for a matter of seconds. However, some traps, like the chandelier can actually stun the crooks for a longer time than most traps, making them the most useful of the game considering their one time only use. Traps eventually vanish after a set amount of uses, so knowing when to use certain ones in moderation is the key to victory.
Kevin can also hide in certain areas, like behind beds, and the clutter in the basement, but this works very hit and miss as well, as they can still catch you. The game’s difficulty is very high, and as the time counts down, it can be even more tricky. It also doesn’t help that the hit detection can be slippy, and even if you drop a trap at the last second, they can sometimes still catch you.
Another problem is that sometimes the traps can phase through the stairs making them useless. Climbing the stairs is another problem I have with the game, where sometimes Kevin can’t climb them without being in the right position, which just wastes time from dodging the crooks. The game has no continues or passwords as expected, and the difficulty as mentioned prior is very difficult considering the game’s mere 20 minute gameplay length.
Not to mention, Marv and Harry are deceptively quick and resilient. They can recover fast, and move quicker than Kevin. Not to mention they can also climb the rope from the house to the tree house. The downside to this is they can climb faster than Kevin, and Kevin can’t drop traps, meaning this is probably one of the more common game over situations in the game.
GRAPHICS
The game’s graphics are rather bland looking, with some nauseating colors for the McCallister home. A plus though is that they do at least try to recreate the house from the movie from top to bottom, despite the fact that it mostly looks like it was done on an old computer paint program. Kevin and the crooks look close enough like their movie counterparts, but everything else looks very bland, especially for a game from 1991.
MUSIC
There’s nothing really earworm worthy in this game. The main theme gets annoying very quick, and you’ll find yourself enjoying the game more on mute. The treehouse tune is very action packed and actually decent, but nothing you’ll remember after playing. The best tune though is the basement, in my opinion. All in all, it’s a blah soundtrack for a blah game.
OVERALL THOUGHTS
Home Alone is an annoyingly hard licensed game, with iffy controls, bad graphics, and forgettable sound. It’s a cash-in cart that just doesn’t have a lot of joy to it. THQ’s NES run in a nutshell. And the sad thing is, this isn’t the only Home Alone game on the NES, and I’d dare say this is the better one.
But with all that said, do I hate it? Honestly, no. It can be a surprisingly solid challenge game that requires you to be fast on your fingers, and always be on the move. Yes, the game’s only 20 minutes, but with the constant worry of being caught by Marv or Harry, it feels more like an hour. And for what they could do with the license, they at least tried to make a game out of the movie, and for what they could, it was actually an okay attempt. It’s frustrating, and can be hell to beat, but for what it was worth, I enjoyed it.
But with that said, I know it certainly won’t appeal to everybody. It’s far from the worst THQ game either, but we’ll deal with that moose in the road in due time. I’d say judge this one on your own merit, you may like it like I did, or you’ll more than likely feel like you were burgled out of your precious time.
RATING: Thumbs in the middle