Sega Master Force
1st August 1993
Love him or loathe him, bet you wish you had Macaulay Culkin's money. He's set to rake in more readies with a game based on his first film. Movie tie-ins have rarely been strong on console, can Sega's homely offering break with tradition, or should it be left well alone?
Home Alone
Doesn't it strike you as strange how loving parents go jet-setting here and there and forget to take their darling son with them? Nobody thinks of phoning the Social Services. Ho-hum, in movie land, anything can happen.
Kevin's parents have gone on vacation and left the tittle brat on his Jack Jones. Little does he know, a gang of burglars are plotting to rob the entire neighbourhood of all but the kitchen sinks!
Kev, in his wisdom, decides to stop them. Traps are set in houses the burglars haven't yet visited and weapons made from various articles left lying around, or bits and bobs discovered while sledging around the gardens and parks of Kev's home town.
There Was A Crooked Man...
When you find a house with burglars inside (you'll more than likely see their van outside), make sure you've got some weapons at the ready. You have to slow the blighters down till the cops arrive.
Glue ensures the ruffians come to a sticky end. Elastic bands help launch missiles. Hairdryers are handy for melting snowballs, ice cream scoops fling hot coals and magnets combine with other weapons to stop the thieves in their tracks.
The more you hit them with your homemade arsenal, the more you hurt them! This sends their pain levels soaring and they disappear for a while.
If you last for 20 minutes without being caught and strung to the nearest wall, the boys in blue arrive to save the day. If all the houses are robbed, the game's over. Kev loses the brattish image he's so very, very proud of and car booters everywhere have a field day!
Ade
When we first saw the Mega Drive version of Home Alone, way back in SEGA FORCE 12, we expected something amazing. With a massive movie licence behind it, Sega should've pulled out all the stops. Sadly, they didn't, and they haven't gone out of their way to make amends with the handheld version.
Home Alone's certainly one of the strangest games I've played. It has several neat touches, like the sledging and weapon-making, but they never add up to anything dazzling.
The graphics are relatively good throughout. The houses have their own styles of decor but the young man himself isn't well animated - he walks with a limp! He's fairly easy to control, though.
Preventing a house from being swamped by crooks is fairly involved. The problem is, once you've set traps and scared the life out of them in one house, that's it! You go through the motions in the other houses.
To give Home Alone its dues, the gameplay's fairly original, but unless you really guffawed at the movie, the novelty soon wears off.
Paul
Home Alone was dire on MD so it came as a surprise to find myself engrossed. The graphics and sound are almost the same as the original and gameplay's identical - so why do (like it? It's because Home Alone is ideally suited to 8-bit machines.
The idea of setting traps and inventing weapons works well. You soon rush around the streets, stocking up on weapons and keeping track of those pesky villains.
With three sub-games and three difficulty settings, Home Alone presents quite a challenge. If you like the films and fancy a different sort of game, give it a go.
Verdict
Very different but lacks variety. Another wasted film licence
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