Home Alone

"And to think this probably *helped* Culkin's career..."

I'm going to admit straight off that I haven't played this game in years. Years as in five or six or seven. Usually when I do a review, I've just finished the title in question, and it's fresh in my mind. Not this time. I haven't played this in years, and I have no urge to do so ever again.

The two burglars from the movie are back, and apparently it was one hell of a jailbreak because they've brought an entire army of crooks with them to rob this kid's house. (This family had better be pretty damned rich, or the individual take from all this is going to be tiny.) And so begins this veritable epic of movie-licensed crap.

The kid is naturally home alone, and he has to fend off the thieves and save his family fortune. Since the last robbery he foiled, he's been carefully greasing his shoes, to ensure that he never, ever stops when you want him to. As if this wasn't enough of a handicap for our resourceful hero, he is armed with...a water pistol. Wait, it gets even better. You can pick up a slingshot, baseballs, or a BB gun, all of which have their own store of ammunition which will run down. The water pistol's is infinite, by the way. I don't even want to know how he's keeping that thing refilled.

Oddly, this water pistol is capable of injuring grown men. Sort of like those high-powered Super Soakers that had to be pulled from the market back in the 90s. They make a real neat ''boop'' noise when they strike an enemy, which is, to the sound engineers' credit, clearly distinguishable from the ''beeps'' that make up most of the FX and music.

The modus operandi of this sorry mess is to wander around four wings of an absolutely immense house, collecting various items- it starts off with jewelry, moves through toys and electronics and ends with pets, of all things. The fourth level reminded me of those houses you sometimes see on the evening news, those belong to people who spend all the time collecting cats and not enough cleaning up after them. (Or throwing off Animal Control off their trail- but I digress.)

Your enemies include black-coated Amish fellows, mailmen, and seven-feet tall wind-up toys. These strange choices of sprites were actually meant to represent hardened robbers, but didn't quite make it. They're pretty much representative of this game's graphics, which are your basic Gameboy Etch-a-Sketches. You compete with them for the loot (they swipe items if they get to them first), which you then cleverly hide by...throwing down the laundry chute. Oy vey. I had no idea VCRs and Gameboys were so robust. Not to mention puppies and kitties.

At some point the brilliant child realizes he's got to actually do something a little more constructive, so he goes down to lock them in the safe. This are the boss stages, which alternately have you fighting squiggly lines (not really sure what they were meant to represent), rats, some other thing (my memory isn't perfect), and ghosts. You defeat the boss of each wing by dropping a loose brick on it. (I'm not really sure if that was a gag from the film, but I wouldn't be surprised. The people who made this weren't exactly blessed in the area of original thinking.) This brick mysteriously reappears each time it is dropped,

You then go onto the final confrontations with the criminal masterminds, which also involve solutions ripped from the movie. One of them even makes use of the old pedophile...and his shovel. Defeat them and you face the final guardian: A furnace.

And if you don't think that's strange, you must first run a gauntlet of baby furnaces. Yes, baby furnaces.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 06/30/02, Updated 06/30/02