Home Alone (NES) Playthrough
462A playthrough of THQ's 1991 license-based action game for the NES, Home Alone.
Loosely based around the plot of the film, Home Alone for the NES puts the player in control of eight-year-old Kevin McCallister, a boy accidentally left at home alone when his scatterbrained family takes off for Paris without him. The large and well-kept McCallister home, now seemingly vacant, becomes the target of the “Wet Bandits,” a criminally-minded pair of idiots that seek to relive the family of their possessions during their absence. Kevin must booby-trap the house, keeping bandits Marv and Harry at bay until the police can come to the rescue.
At the start of the game, Kevin is standing in the front hallway and can run and hide anywhere in the house’s four stories or in his treehouse. He must successfully evade the bad guys for twenty real-time minutes until the police arrive in order to succeed.
The house is littered with objects that Kevin can use to defend himself: dropping things like Micro Machines and Buzz’s pet tarantula in the path of the Bandits will stun them, providing Kevin with an opportunity to get away. He may also hide in a few pre-determined spots, though they are only effective if the robbers aren’t in the same room when Kevin uses them.
Similar in concept to Pac-Man, Home Alone is a maze-based chase game that, according to the instruction manual, features “extremely intelligent villains, in that they are modeled with actual human behavior. Being ‘smart’ enables them to track Kevin down in a way that is unique to the [NES] library of enemy characters.” The sheer gall of these guys, huh?
Being "smart" here means that the bad guys wander aimlessly until they see Kevin, and then they make a beeline straight for him, no matter the hazards in their path. Apparently the desire to brutalize a defenseless child outweighs any sense of self-preservation here.
The primary problem with Home Alone is the control’s lack of responsiveness. Kevin tends to get stuck on staircases and corners, both of which are regular sources of game overs. A map showing the layout of the house and the trap locations is available in-game, though it serves little practical purpose but to tell the player how much more torture must be endured before the game ends.
The graphics are appalling. Garish wallpaper patterns have been plastered haphazardly across the backgrounds, and the animation is awkward and stilted - just check out Kevin's lurching running animation. The sound is equally as terrible: the music will get on your nerves the instant the game starts and is only occasionally interrupted by one of the game’s three ridiculous digitized sound effects.
Home Alone for the NES represents little more than a desperate and cheap attempt to make a quick buck off of one of Hollywood’s biggest properties. The game’s core gameplay mechanic is somewhat novel, but the execution is so inept that any potential it had hardly matters. Like the great majority of THQ’s products on the NES, this one should be avoided at all costs.
*This is a brand new playthrough to replace my original video of the game. The video quality is much higher and the gameplay is more thorough. I think I actually died a bit on the inside recording it, so please enjoy!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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