Home Alone 2
Nintendo Entertainment System
If I am remembering correctly, this was one of the last games released in the lifespan of the NES. Being an enormous Home Alone fan, I had missed out on the first game. With the era of the NES coming to a close, I wasn't about to let the same thing happen with the sequel.
I got this for Christmas and proceeded to play the crap out of it. My initial reaction to this game was one of confusion. By this time in my life, I was used to video games that were based on movies taking liberties with the plot of the movie. This one however, went a little too far. I ended up liking it though. A lot of what you are supposed to do is unclear, and back in the early 90's I didn't have internet to look shit up. Although I thought the game was very bizarre, I still enjoyed it.
I don't know what happened to my original copy of the game, but somehow it must have been given away or sold. Fast forward to the 2010s. My friend Brett was moving away to Colorado and had given me some of his old games he didn't want anymore. Home Alone 2 was one of them. This game sat around collecting dust in my NES collection since I had so many other games to play. And while I liked this game as a kid, I knew it was mainly sentimentality speaking (the game probably sucks to anyone who didn't grow up playing it. Heck, even I wasn't sure what to think about it back in the day) so I basically ignored it for a few years.
When I started doing this blog, I thought - hey. This might be an interesting game to go back and play again. Interesting is definitely the right word for it.
You start out in the lobby of the hotel that Kevin stays in in the movie. You are being harassed and chased by angry employees. But that's not the weird part. The weird part is all the random crap the makers of the game decide to throw at you. You get attacked by runaway mops, suitcases, and vacuum cleaners. Old ladies try to whack you with their canes. Big fat black men in pimp outfits try to strangle you. What the heck is going on in this game?
As you progress, you also collect a number of bizarre items. The game doesn't tell you what the items do, and I didn't have the instruction book, so I had to figure it out myself. Get enough pizza slices and you get an extra life. Things that look like brown poop balls give you extra health (I found out later they are supposed to be cookies). You also get weapons like air guns and um, tranquilizer darts (?) that you use to shoot at people. Also, you can collect pearl necklaces to throw on the ground and trip up your enemies. Definitely, the collection of random items and enemies in the first part of the game alone is enough to make even the most seasoned gamer be like: wut?
Also weird in this game is just the very nature of figuring out what the heck you are supposed to do. In most 2D side scrollers like this, you run from left to right. You battle enemies. You reach the end. Maybe there is a boss fight at the end. There is some kind of definite goal in mind.
No, not here. When you reach the far right side of the screen, the game dead ends and you are stuck in front of a bunch of elevators that refuse to open. You don't know if there is a glitch happening, or what is going on. Eventually after you press the button a good number of times, they finally open and zip you up to another floor. Why you are going up when you are attempting to escape to the outside is beyond me.
The whole hotel section of the game is random. Basically, the elevator drops you off on multiple floors. All you have to do is run to the end of the floor, and run back and get on the elevator. After this happens enough times, you are taken down to the kitchen, where you must battle a bunch of demented cooks who throw food at you. At the end of the kitchen is the first real boss of the game. The head chef throws pieces of meat around and attempts to squash you with a giant jumping move. All your weapons pass through him and don't do any damage, so you have to improvise. Kevin comes equipped with a slide move (remember in the movie when he slides under a bunch of people and whacks their crotches with his head?) and you have to use this on the chef. Every time you hit him, he loses an article of clothing. Eventually when he loses all his clothes, he tries to run away but turns into a giant pizza which gives you an extra life. You are then allowed to leave the kitchen. Ooooookay then.
This takes you to the next major section of the game: Outside. Here, you basically run through the park avoiding deranged criminals who jump out of the bushes and try to whack you with sticks. Again, after a while you hit a dead end. I was at a loss as to what to do and must have run back and forth between the dead end and the beginning of the level a half dozen times before I figured out there was one pole you could climb that took me to the top of this big building. You can't climb any of the other poles. And the game doesn't indicate whatsoever that this is what you are supposed to do. You just have to luck into it, I guess. After you get to the top of the building, you then have to jump off the far side of the building and go down into an open sewer grate.
I remember hating this part as a kid, but as an adult it really isn't that hard. In the sewer - a bunch of birds fly overhead (birds in the sewer?) and drop twigs on you. You can basically just run and slide past most of them and get to the end without being touched once. At the end is a ladder that takes you up, but the birds keep flying by. You can't start up the ladder and stop or go back down. If you try that, you will fall off. So you have to memorize their pattern and make a mad dash to the top. Not that hard to figure out now, but I had fits during this part as a kid.
Shortly after this, you find yourself in the booby trapped house which is the location for most of the mayhem and madness in the movie. I was hoping for a toy store level, but alas, I never got one. Sad face.
The house to me was the most frustrating part of the game. The booby traps abound, and you have to set them off with your dartgun or else Harry and Marv catch you and it is insta-death. Also, there are a lot of perilous platforming sections where you must jump from one suspended beam to the next. One slight slip up kills you. And you will slip up. A lot.
The house section mainly consists of finding keys that unlock doors that lead up to the roof of the house. Each floor of the house contains its own dangers and obstacles you must overcome. And lots and lots of those beam jumping segments.
After reaching the roof, you climb via a rope back down to the street, Harry and Marv in close pursuit. You must keep ahead of them, or once again it is insta-death. But the only way to avoid getting caught by them is to run ahead close to the edge of the screen, where things like rats and flying sewer grates will pop in and hit you with little to no notice whatsoever. This was also a problem section of the game for me, although I don't particularly remember struggling here as a kid. Prepare to die a lot, and have to start the game over from the beginning again. It is very frustrating.
After this, you come to the end of the game. You climb a giant Christmas tree, and at the top, you queue the bird lady to drop seeds on the heads of Harry and Marv, which causes birds to swoop in and hurt them. Hurt them enough, and eventually you defeat them. And the game ends. Yippy! It will take you several playthroughs of the game before you finally can figure out what to do in each stage. But the game is very short. On the playthrough where I finally did beat the game, I clocked my completion time at 18 minutes.
Graphically, the game is nothing special. Everything looks very basic. I've definitely seen better graphics out of the NES, and even on games significantly older than this one. The music is repetitive but doesn't bug you too much. You can faintly make out traces of the Home Alone theme song in the background of the hotel level, so props to them for at least trying. Sound effects are your typical beeps and bloops. Nothing special there.
Cut scenes in the game are not good. They take place in Ninja Gaiden fashion, but are really ugly to look at. Particularly the one at the end of the game when Kevin is with his parents. And they take an obnoxiously long time to finish too. The words come up too slow, and you just want them to hurry up already. Although, you don't want to hit a button and accidentally skip through everything.
It sound like I am complaining a lot about this game. And rightfully so. Ugly graphics, basic sounds, frustrating difficulty, and confusing gameplay that leaves you often with absolutely no idea of what you are to do next. Despite all of this, I somehow oddly like the game. If I had picked it up now without having sentimental memories of this title as a kid, I would probably be luck: "what the fuck IS this shit???? This is terrible!"
But be that as it may, I do have sentimental feelings for the game. I played this a lot as a kid. Getting stuck and finding out what to do without the help of a guide or the internet was quite an accomplishment. And mastering the game's steep difficulty was no easy task. Sure the game probably sucks, but picking it up now as an adult brings all those memories of a better, more innocent time back to me.
I will admit that this game isn't any good. If you pick it up and play this for the first time in the present day, you will be frustrated by its poor graphics and hopelessly clueless sense of direction. Read a lot of reviews out there, and you will see people rate this title on a scale of 1-10 as a 1 or 2.
But hey, I like it. Despite its flaws, I still was able to pick this up and have a good time. There were some moments where I rage quit and threw the controller across the room, but that was part of life when playing NES games like this back in the day.
Home Alone 2 doesn't withstand the test of time. But I don't care. This was a big part of my childhood and I am willing to overlook its flaws and have a good time when I play it. Well, a relatively good time anyway.
Wait, what am I saying? This game is shit. No, it's fun. No, it's shit. Damn it. I can't decide. I am just going to give it a C and call it a day. Work for you? It works for me.
Overall:
C
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