Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (PC) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
261A playthrough of Capstone Entertainment's 1992 license-based action game for PCs running MS-DOS, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
Played on the medium difficulty level.
Lost in New York for the PC is a completely different game than the one released for games consoles, just as the original Home Alone game was. It's nowhere near as ambitious as the console titles (please note that I mean "ambitious" only as a relative term - it's not like the other games were particularly complex), but within its limited scope, this one does what it sets out to do quite well.
It's an "endless runner" style game a couple of decades before that would become a thing, except that it is not endless. There are 14 stages that Kevin has to run through as he is chased by the Sticky Bandits. The entire game involves avoiding obstacles, grabbing objects to throw at the criminals, and activating traps to slow them down as you get away. Once you finish the fourteenth stage, you get a few digitized stills from the film, and that's it. Unless you want to start over from the beginning.
The graphics are easily the high point of the game, and show off just what advantages the PC gave over the consoles. This is especially a biggie considering that the game only required a 286 equipped with a VGA adapter and 640K of memory - in 1992, 286s were still quite popular, but the *massively* more capable 486 chip had already been on the market for a couple of years. For a 286 to pull of such (fairly) smooth scrolling and fully detailed VGA sprites and backdrops without any terribly long load times was a fair achievement. The digitzed stills also look really nice - as good as I've ever seen in VGA for sure. But that music... ugh. It's just one short song that loops over and over, and it awkwardly reminds me of the Carmen Sandiego theme. The game supports Sound Blaster cards (this is how it sounds with a SB16 configured as a SB Pro in the game's setup utility), but there aren't any sound effects in the game, whether sampled or synthesized through the OPL2. I wouldn't blame you if you muted the video after a minute or two.
The controls are pretty good, but let me warn you - if you want to play this, use a joystick or a gamepad. Old PCs had issues with some action games using the keyboard - if you overload the buffer, the inputs get pretty screwy. Since you have to hold left or right to move, if you use the keyboard, the game will often bog down and mess up your movement, or flat-out freeze you at random points. PC joystick polling doesn't suffer from this issue though, so you're better off with that option.
Home Alone 2 is quite short and simple, but it suits the style of game well - this would be a real trudge if it lasted for an hour, but when the game only lasts ten minutes, it doesn't need much variety to keep itself entertaining. It's not as good as the original Home Alone PC game, but it's not too bad either.
I don't know if it was a full price game or not when it came out, but I kinda doubt it. At least, I hope not.
And this marks the end of my run of Home Alone games for this holiday season.To my knowledge, the only ones that I haven't played and recorded are the Amiga game (which is nearly identical to the Dos game), the Game Gear game (which is nearly the same as the Genesis game), and the regrettable PS2 game, which.... ugh. Maybe next year. Maybe. I'm not looking forward to it, just so you all know.
If you'd like to see any other Home Alone games that I have done, click my channel icon and search the channel for Home Alone. I promise you won't be wanting for choice - I've done eleven different different games.
I hope you all have enjoyed my series of playthroughs of Home Alone games. It always felt wrong to me to play these games any other time of year.
I hope everyone has an excellent holiday with loved ones! Merry Christmas!
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!
Visit for the latest updates!
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NintendoComplete/540091756006560
https://twitter.com/nes_complete