Home Alone (PC) Playthough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Capstone Software's 1991 license-based platform game for PCs running MS-DOS, Home Alone: A Family Game Without the Family.

Home Alone for the computer (released for 8088+ PCs and the Amiga 500) was a completely different title based on the famous Macaulay Culkin Christmas movie from those made for dedicated games machines. This one was developed by Manley & Associates, who did quite an odd assortment of titles in their day before being swallowed up by EA, and relatively speaking, it's not that bad for a movie-licensed cash-in title.

Unlike most of the other Home Alone games, this title doesn't focus on grabbing riches and hiding them from the robbers. Oh no. Home Alone PC is all about survival, and follows the movie a fair amount closer than the other titles to the movie because of it.

Kevin has an hour before the Wet Bandits show up to end him, and so the game begins with a period of time where you run around the house looking for dangerous objects and turning them into strategically-placed traps. Once an in-game hour passes, Kevin will announce that he's ready and Harry and Marv show up.

Once the second part begins, Kevin has to run around, baiting the robbers to stumble into the different traps that he has laid. The goal is to injure each of them ten times (each hit shows as a tally mark in the status windows). If they aren't chasing Kevin, they'll wander into the traps, but sometimes they'll merely disarm them without being hit. The best way to make use of the limited number of traps is to get Harry or Marv to chase Kevin: because they are distracted, they will blindly take damage by running straight into every trap in their paths. You have to be careful in how you lead them, though, because if Kevin makes contact with any of the traps he has laid he'll wipe them out.

The game looks really nice for a 1991 VGA title - it was by no means the best looking game out there, but it was a pretty sharp looking title - especially compared to the console games. There isn't any digital sound, but the game can play music through an Adlib or a MIDI playback module (like the MT-32). The music is alright, and stays nicely upbeat throughout. I like the Adlib soundtrack - the one that plays in this video - largely because it sounds like a Sega Genesis game (which makes sense, since the Adlib uses an OPL2). The run-and-jump controls are a bit sluggish, but the game doesn't really require too much in the way of reflexes, so the mechanics don't get in the way too often. The button mappings for picking up and placing items could've been a bit more intuitive, though - F1, F2, and F3 are hardly ideal keybindings for actions that require some sort of timing.

The game is quite fun for the first few times you play it. Nothing changes from game to game, though, so it probably won't take you long to get through it, and once you have, there really isn't much else to see or do.

It seemed only appropriate to include this in the round-up of Home Alone games I've been posting lately, so hopefully you all enjoy this one as well! Happy holidays!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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