Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

"A decent effort by Capstone, who knew?"

The world of the sequel is an unforgiving one in the film and the gaming world alike. Littered with a multitude of bad titles, mediocre attempts and a very small amount of decent to good ones. Capstone’s Home Alone 2: Lost in New York falls in the “decent” category of things. Surprising, considering not only the ratio of movies to bad game conversions, but also that Capstone was one of the worst companies to ever produce games. Maybe if they had made more games like this and the original (Home Alone), they would still be around today. Somehow, they manage to take this one series and make better games out of it than any of the others who tried (the NES, SNES and GENESIS games). That said; lets take a look at one of the games they did RIGHT.

PLOT/STORY: (4/10) No dialog. None. But when you think about it, you don’t need any. This game obviously follows the movie, and actually gets the locations right for that matter. If you’ve seen the movie, you know what’s going on. The Wet Bandits, Harry and Marv, are trying to break into the big time by robbing a toy store. Kevin, who just happens to be there, must stop them. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

MUSIC/SOUND: (5/10) The music does its job pretty well. Some of the tunes stick (and THAT gets annoying, let me tell you) and the others are at least functional within the game. There are pretty much no sound effects to speak of though, and I have a small problem with that. Still, it isn’t THAT big of a deal….

GRAPHICS: (8/10) This score reflects the graphics of the time period (obviously). The game is colorful and the backgrounds are nicely done. There is a little less character detail in the burglars than the original Home Alone, and that’s a bit disappointing. But overall, the graphics are effective.

GAMEPLAY: (7/10) This is a departure from the first game, which involved setting traps and then running around the house making Harry and Marv fall for them. Here, it’s a straight-up side-scrolling action game. This is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it’s really fun. As Kevin, you run through the game’s 15 stages, ranging from the streets of New York to the Plaza Hotel to Duncan’s Toy Store and the Brownstone House. All the while you try to avoid being caught by Harry and Marv. To help you accomplish this, you can pick up a variety of items and use them to slow down the burglars. These items can be almost anything, and there is no shortage of them. This actually makes the game a little TOO easy, but you can choose between 3 difficulty levels to spice things up a bit. The major complaint I have is that the game gets very repetitive after a bit, plus it’s a little on the easy side, even on hard mode. But the game can actually get fairly addicting.

REPLAY VALUE: (6/10) After an hour or so you’ll stop, but for some odd reason, you’ll probably be back the next day. I was, and I still can’t explain why. It’s just a fun way to kill some time.

WHERE TO FIND IT: Buying it is out of the question pretty much. Capstone went the way of the Dodo long ago. But fear not! You can get it at the Underdogs site, and probably lots of other places too because its public domain now. Just do some searching.

OVERALL: (7/10) Not as good as the first one, but still a decent, strangely addicting game. It’s nothing spectacular, but it is a good bet for a time killer. Plus it’s free. So check it out if you have the chance.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/30/03, Updated 04/30/03