 Home Alone was a gigantic movie released during the holiday season of 1990, and like all blockbuster movies of course there's a video game adaptation, or in this case several adaptations made by several different developers. Home Alone found its way to the NES, Super Nintendo, Game Boy, Genesis, Game Gear, Master System, Amiga, and DOS, but unfortunately the Super Nintendo version was developed by Imagineering, the same group responsible for games like Home Improvement, Power Tool Pursuit, and Race Driven, two of the absolute worst games on the system. The rest of their catalog isn't exactly sterling either, with the best game of the bunch probably being Super Battle Tank. Anyway, in the Super Nintendo edition of Home Alone you play as Kevin McAllister, tasked with bringing all of the McAllister family's valued possessions down to lock into a safe in the basement while avoiding the wet bandits Harry and Marv. The game more or less follows the story of the film, as far as the overall structure goes anyway, complete with the characters likenesses, so it at least has that going for it. Otherwise, if first impressions matter to you, this is as bad as a first impression as you can get. This looks bad even for an NES game, which means the NES game looks, well, don't get me started on that one. So you start out in your own room, pressing up to open dressers and go through doors, the stuff you collect, you gotta put down these laundry shoots, and everything all just kinda sits there in a big pile. There's these random dudes here you gotta ignore, and you just, uh, shoot them with your squirt gun until they keel over. Are you shooting them with ammonia or Ipacac or something? When they're doubled over like that, you just jump over them. So yeah, this is a game where you collect stuff and avoid stuff, and the number underneath the safe icon up top tells you how many things you need to collect. And a lot of placements are unintuitive, like who puts a ring behind a mirror, and who keeps money laying around everywhere in sacks with big dollar signs on them. What is a Scrooge McDuck's mansion? Once the counter hits zero, a key will appear next to the basement door, and you head downstairs to contend with bats and rats. And again, you're just avoiding everything, and that's fine. Not every game has to be Contra or Mario or whatever, but the controls here are terrible. This reminds me of Wizard of Oz where you have no idea what you can and can't jump on, or what can and can't hurt you. Once you get to the basement, avoiding all the enemies is such a pain. After that part, you get a boss fight where you have to make a concrete block fall on it a few times. Boring. There's four long levels here too, or at least they seem long. I should mention that the Genesis game is totally different, where you have to defend multiple houses against Marvin Harry by setting traps and inflicting pain, as indicated by the pain meter. Okay, that's pretty funny. And everything is hinged on a time limit. This game has more of a strategic slant, and I have to admit, it's not that bad. Sure, the controls are god-awful, but it's at least something different other than a generic platformer. But hey, if you love generic platformers and are a huge fan of games like Family Dog, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, and the Home Improvement Game, then hey, you'll love Home Alone on Super Nintendo. Or you could play like three dozen other platformers that are much better than this. It's your call. Just in case you can't get enough Home Alone, here's Home Alone 2, Lost in New York. And again, we're saddled with Imagineering as the developer for the Super Nintendo Edition. But at least this time, it's a more traditional generic platformer, if that makes sense. You do get a few extra attacks here, like sliding, along with a couple extra items and weapons. It does a decent job following the movie, if that matters to you. And you get to set traps for the villains, which is a nice touch. Unfortunately, the structure of this game gets old quickly. Like in the first level, you get all the way to the end of the hallway, go back to the elevator, explore all the rooms, and knock out all the enemies, and backtrack all the way back to the elevator again, and repeat. There's five levels here, and no way to save. But this game takes like 25 minutes to beat. While Home Alone 2 is better than the first game, and it's not god-awful or anything, it's still incredibly dull. The enemy sprite animation is as cheap and lazy as it gets, and the level design feels thrown together. And again, just like the first game, you're better off playing it on Sega Genesis. It's a completely different game developed by Sega Interactive, the same team that made eternal champions and dinosaurs for hire. It's a decent enough platformer, and not exactly worth going out of your way to play or anything. I'm just saying, it's more worth your time than the Super Nintendo version. So yeah, if for whatever reason you're jonesing for a Home Alone fix, why wouldn't you just avoid all these games and just watch the movies? But if you have to play some Home Alone video games, play the two Genesis games.