All That I Can To Keep Track of Time in My Head (Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Hook)

As with High Speed we have here a swath of my childhood in the wrong medium. Two thirds of these were based on movies I saw and loved as a child; I had the quasi-board game poster that came with the Home Alone VHS on the wall behind the TV I played most of my Nintendo games on and it stayed there for decades of no longer caring about the movie or indeed living in the house until the the entire basement got torn out and redeveloped. Hook meanwhile was a deeply beloved sort of film—a hot mess that nevertheless had all the ingredients to be deeply enjoyable by a nine-year-old. (The Home Alone sequel, on the other hand, was not good enough and too young for a ten year old.) These are not necessarily pleasures that have aged well; I remember Home Alone ageing to a sort of charming cringe last time it was on some Christmas, and while I haven’t seen Hook in over a decade I suspect it’s a softly charming film whose flaws are a lot more evident. Not bad as early 90s popular culture goes, but certainly not the white hot thrill of youth.

But of course, this is not an essay about the films. It is an essay about the games adapted from the films, all of which are, in a pattern designed to remind me why I didn't update this blog for a decade, absolutely fucking terrible. Tie-in shovelware designed to be forgotten the moment the sting of having spent money on it fades. In this regard it resembles Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, the shitty cash-in sequel on a coherent original idea, these days more remembered for a Donald Trump cameo than for actual substance.

Ironically in the world of Nintendo games Home Alone 2 is the stronger game—a banal sidescroller of the "there is no rational reason why all of these things should be dangerous to me" variety that has you dodging bellhops, suitcases, and oddly homicidal hotel receptionists. There's an interpretation to be spun here, the homicidal hotel prefiguring its 1992 owner's later career, but for fuck's sake, I don't want to. The game fundamentally isn't interesting enough to merit an argument like that. It's not even interesting enough to justify this essay, but I've taken two nine months already to write it, so here we are. This is simply an arbitrary collection of symbols arranged into a game-like shape in a broadly bare minimum way. 

Hook is similar—a side-scroller game in which questions like "controls" and "gameplay" are entirely secondary, the point of the exercise being to simply arrange some iconography recognizable as film-adjacent on the screen in a roughly playable fashion. In this case you play as the most inept Peter Pan ever, wielding the world's least effective knife as you use a series of janky and alarmingly loose controls to navigate Neverland. It's vaguely a Zelda II clone, but in the sense of one of those mad scientist laboratories full of failed specimens with monstrous bodies that cling to an agonizing and unholy life.

What is interesting about these two games, however, is that they are almost wholly indifferent to the matter of being games. I've mentioned their flaws, but it's worth stressing just how far-ranging they are. These games fundamentally do not play. Their controls are sloppy to the point of parody, their mechanics are tedious (in both games your only real option is to dodge virtually everything), and none of it is organized around a notion of human interaction. There is nothing here save for the cold reality of the iconography—symbols of the properties these games are really just marketing for. The emptiness here is abyssal.

In contrast, then, sits Home Alone, which is also a bad game, but which at least has some vision of being interesting. It is a tight and claustrophobic thing—its hook is simply that you must survive in the house for twenty minutes while being chased by the bandits from popular kids movie Home Alone. As with many NES games it plays terribly if you simply pick it up, but has a weird appeal that might well have been grasped through obsessive replay due to lack of other options. It is counterintuitive, confusing, but has depth to that, and the central setup of “survive for twenty minutes” is so immediately striking as to carry it through. There are children who loved this, or who at least came to enjoy their dislike of it.

In practice you can glitch it, enacting a foolproof strategy that removes all skill from the game by abusing the limitations of its AI. The old promise of magic, then: that there is a cheat, somewhere, deep in the secret sediment of the world, waiting to be uncovered.