It's not often we get to see celebrities playing video games for the general public, unless we count Conan's Clueless Gamer series or the guest stars that occasionally appear on Up, Up, Down, Down. However, in one special case, 1990s superstar Macaulay Culkin decided to give the Home Alone games based on the titular movie series a playthrough and allow the internet to see it in all its glory.
The 19 minute video was posted up over on the Cinemassacre YouTube channel as part of the Angry Video Game Nerd series.
The video starts with the Angry Video Game Nerd saying he won't be playing any Christmas games, and then the star of the Home Alone series, Macaulay Culkin, comes over with a pizza box filled with Home Alone games. As the Pizza Boy, he convinces the Angry Video Game Nerd to play the other Home Alone games apart from the ones released on the NES. This includes a European PS2 exclusive simply titled Home Alone, which came out way back in 2006, and to be honest, I never knew it existed.
After going over a history of the games, the duo finally get into playing the SNES version of Home Alone, and it gets ragged on pretty badly, especially when pointing out that it appears to feature villains from 007: James Bond movies for no reason at all.
Macaulay doesn't actually start playing his own games until they get around to Home Alone 2 on the SNES at the eight minute mark. They point out that the games are extremely horrible and don't really convey the movie at all, especially since you spend an inordinate amount of time fighting bats and being able to knee-slide on the ground to kill bloody rats.
This was a common theme in many movie-based games back in the day. A lot of the games back then had nothing to do with the actual movies. Games like Cliffhanger, Demolition Man and Timecop 2 were pretty much movie-games in name only, while the actual content was something completely different. But on the upside, not all the Home Alone games are horrible. The very first Home Alone on the Sega Genesis turned out to be pretty good. Unfortunately, Home Alone 2 on the Sega Genesis turned out to be one of the worst games made in the series.
A lot of the inconsistency in the game quality across the platforms was down to the fact that different developers would take on making different games on each system. Sometimes a sequel game on the same system was made by someone completely different from the people who worked on the original. For instance, Sega of America handled the original Home Alone on the Genesis, which Angry Nerd and Macaulay Culkin felt was the best game in the series. Imagineering was in charge of making the sequel, which came out just a year later on the Genesis, which Angry Nerd and Macaulay Culkin both hated because it was like a worse version of the SNES game. So different developers obviously produced different quality products.
At least the end of the video managed to get some sweet justice against the games by having them cartridges subjected to some vile traps inspired by the movies.
