Bad Games That I Love: Home Alone (SNES)

Time for another new feature: Bad Games That I Love. Pretty self explanatory but I guess I'll elaborate one thing. By "bad games" I mean games that either have mostly low review scores and/or I have witnessed a decent number of people expressing their hate for said game.

I first played Home Alone pretty soon after it came out. I saw the film in theaters so I was already a fan before I played it. The game is a fairly simple platformer. In each stage you run around a section of Kevin's house, collect valuables so the crooks can't get them, and put the valuables in the basement safe.

Man, the MacCallisters are serious about security...Why didn't they put their valuables in the safe before they left?

You have a quota to meet for each level and once you reach it, you must enter the basement where you, I'm not joking about this, must navigate through what can only be described as a defensive line of common household pests such as rats or roaches. At the end of the basement is a huge boss version of these pests which you must defeat by dropping a huge brick on it. Yeah, I remember that scene from the film. The one where Kevin dodges hordes of rats and roaches before killing their giant king with a brick. Anyway, after you beat the boss you throw the valuables in the bank vault sized safe and it's off to the next level.

Best part of the movie. I'm glad they worked so hard to recreate it for the game.

Other than the hordes of pests in the basement, there's only a few types of enemies during the normal parts of the stages, all of them robbers who of course look nothing like the actors from the movie. Kevin is only armed with toys and he has a limited amount of ammunition so make every shot count. He does have a water gun with infinite ammo but it can only stun enemies.

Joe Pesci?

The McCallister household is freaking enormous by the way. Each level has a different type of valuable that you need to collect like toys or pets and I recall a cutscene before one of the levels where Kevin mentions the "electronics wing". They have an entire "wing" of their house devoted to electronics? I would have said that they accidentally confused Home Alone and that shitty Richie Rich movie but this game came out a few years before that film.

Jeeze, and I thought the bank vault was extravagant...

For whatever reason I still really enjoy this game. The jumping controls are awful, the combat is confusing, and it barely follows the film at all. It hardly even has any traps in it; one of the film's most recognizable hallmarks. I still enjoy it though. Call it nostalgia or whatever but it's a game that I still fire up from time to time.

Is that freakin' Oddjob? Guess I was wrong about the Richie Rich thing. They must have thought they were making a Goldfinger game.