Lol, dont get me started.
BELOW IS A REVEIW FROM GAMERANKING.COM THAT I HAD TO POST HERE, IT PRETTY MUCH SUMMARIZES WHAT I HAD TO SAY ABOUT THIS GAME:
What happens when you take a crappy movie and decide to make a game out of it? Well, considering good movies rarely, if ever, translate into decent titles, you end up with the worst crap ever made. A game so bad, that one would actually consider making something other than the SNES the greatest of video game consoles. A game so bad, the SNES is almost placed next to the likes of the Jaguar.
That game? Home Alone 2.
You guessed it, a game based on a movie about a really horrible little kid you want to strangle with telephone wire and beat heavily with a large sack of cement, then use the cement to dump him in the Mariana’s Trench so he’ll never be able to escape. I don’t know what ruined Culkin’s career more, the movie or this horrible game that got the kids’ face plastered on it.
Home Alone 2 - How I Ended Up With It
The history is teary eyed, very teary eyed. Not because it is such a good memory, but it comes back and grabs me by the balls and yanks hard. I have spent years in therapy trying to forget the fateful day this steaming pile of *Internet Edit* landed in my hands. It was Christmas, many a moon ago, and what better thing to get than a video game? Well, I guess I pissed Santa off good and plenty that year. Apparently coal was too good a gift for me...I mean, you can make that into diamonds, at least. The Jolly Man himself, filled with enough spite and hate to scare guys like Saddam into submission, sucked his chubby self down my chimney and stuck Home Alone 2 under my tree. That is the day, it pains me, I have to use steel wool and turpentine to rub the filth from my body just thinking about it.
Graphics - Who The Hell is THAT!?
Normally when you get a movie licensed game, the developers normally kick the graphics up the best they can go given the system. BUT, little did the developers know, simply by putting Culkin’s slimy face into the game instantly degraded the graphics around it. Not that the visuals were even all that good to begin with.
Let us begin with the first level. What you are given as your typical enemy are normal hotel cleaning appliances (more on this later). Take the vacuum cleaner for example. Imagine taking a pillow drawn by a 2 year old; jamming a stick into it, and calling it a Hoover. Yep, they are just THAT bad.
Another example, bats. If you are one of the unlucky few to actually manage to break your way past level 1 (again, more on this later), you are treated with bats. Flying circles with what can best be described as flapping papers stuck out the side. Cool...not.
Backgrounds are horrid as well. The house is broken down, but that is no excuse to pull my eyes out and stomp on them with the sickening use of colors and textures. Graphics suck, suck as badly as the dog under a blanket looking floor waxer.
Sounds - Oh the Horror!
I would like to comment more on the sounds, but my ears fell off shortly after the opening credit sequence. They ran off and took a vacation to Cancun. I’m guessing my going Van Gogh saved me from the torture that was the sound department.
Gameplay - Getting Culkin Killed is Bad?
The object of the game is to not get the freaky kid killed. What the hell is the fun of that? Anyway, let us get to the actual gameplay, the way it was *meant* to be (snicker). Your object is to jump over stuff, shoot things with weapons designed by mental patients (Hmm, plunger gun, how ORIGINAL) and cream the thieves with traps that are so "clever" they make your brain ooze out of your ears...if they haven't left your body yet, that is.
Of course, they also decided to do a flip on you. First stage, you are dumped off in a hotel, and apparently, the local cleaning appliances dislike you (as they should). They go on a murderous rampage and roll back and forth in a predicable manner in a given region. They won’t chase you as the intrepid maids set up invisible fences and they get shocked if they go too far. So, your job is to get past inanimate objects, avoiding slipping on stuff, and go up an elevator. Combine this with a control scheme that moves as fast as a dead raccoon, you are in for a very good time.
So, I go up, and I find this blob-thing that makes me spin in the air like a drug-addled freak. Wow, it actually allows me to kill home cleaning appliances! How lucky, assuming I am not stupid enough to go into any hotel rooms, which have a cleaning appliance spawned next to me, ready to pounce and kill (or in this case, take my spiny *Internet Edit* from me).
So, getting lucky, and avoiding getting touched by metallic things, as cleaning myself is bad, I find my way to a service elevator, which for unknown reasons only connects the very top floor and the basement together, and nothing in between (that would have made too much sense, and would have saved me the horror of actually climbing the damned hotel, floor by floor). So, I get down into the basement, and a knife flies out of nowhere. I dodge it. I come to find there is a crazed chef ready to serve up Culkin Kabobs. Hey, this kitchen failed the health inspections and the choice of foodstuffs proves that.
So, in the only enjoyable moment in the game, Culkin takes a knife between the eyes and dies a horrible death the kid deserves. So, I repeated this around 8 times. Then, I decided I wanted to get to the next level (hey, I’m a sadist) so I ran at him a few more times. I noticed using anything beyond that drug-addled spiny thing was utterly useless as apparently plungers and fat chefs don’t mix well. I hit him a few times, then apparently the wonderful collision detection system kicks in and decides I got hit by something that isn’t there and die. That's OK, I'll bring out the big guns.
Out comes the red and black beauty - Game Genie. Grant me my wishes, Genie, make this game not suck! Unfortunately, there weren’t any such codes in the book, so I had to take the second best unlimited lives and immortality. So, with my newfound God-like powers overflowing in my emaciated annoying kid vessel, I stomped into the kitchen with my spiny thing. *THUNK*, there goes my spiny thing and now I am locked in an eternal battle with a fat chef. Wow, start over.
Eventually, I ruled all over that fat bastard. You want the recipe for THAT?! Huh?! It let me go. Then, I somehow went from the backdoor of a hotel into lovely Central Park. First, not a mugger to be seen, second, the only things I DO have to worry about are bats, third, the developers didn’t expect anyone to get past the chef. The game becomes a cakewalk from here on out, maybe because the testers never made it far enough to give their opinions (or dove off the top of the building by being selected for it).
I walk through this park and run into a house, which, for some odd reason, already had traps pre-set and moronic thieves within. So, I walk into a room. Hmm, bowling ball positioned over head of thief who is staring blankly into a bare corner of a room, ramp, smaller ball, and a plunger gun in your hand. So, I sat there for a few hours, when Stephen Hawking rolled on in and said to me, "I hypothesize that the use of the plunger with the well placed target icon above will cause the ball to roll, hitting the larger ball, stopping that thief in his tracks." GENIUS! Well, that is about the extent of the game. Drop a pair of thugs with a couple of poorly put together traps that reek of cleverness like trash reeks of roses. Suddenly, the game is over, you are back home with the family, good day, good day! Right, hit me with a sock filled with lead to stop the nightmare.
Anything Good?
Did anything good come from this nasty title? What are you thinking? Macaulay Culkin and "good" can't be used in the same sentence. Well...I did manage to sell this pile of crap to a sucker for $20. HA! Take that freak! That'll teach you to buy video games from a garage sale!
Bottom Line
If there ever was a title that pushed me to the brink of giving up gaming in its entirety, it would be Home Alone 2. That takes skill, talent, and a thousand other abilities that nobody else bothered to develop. This is a title that belongs in a hill next to the Atari E.T. "storage mound" in that landfill, never to be touched again. Actually, they should all be melted down so archaeologists in the future don’t think present day society is a worthless sludge heap.