Is This The Real Life? Is This Just Fantasy? (Hollywood Squares, Home Alone, Home Alone 2)

Maybe it's just where the Nintendo Project happened to leave off, but I can't help but notice the theme of Nintendo games as some sort of transformative property; attempting to adapt something from the real world, the physical realm of planet Earth, into a video game. Video games, I always thought, were a sort of fantastic escape. A way for an imaginative player to delve into the depths of Transylvania. Blast through hordes of bad guys with a machine gun. Things impossible to do in our real world. We have done this already with Heavy Barrel, at least. Everything else? Snowboarding. Pinball. A shooting range. Today we start by doing something that is not impossible to do... but improbable. Today we're a contestant on a game show.

Hollywood Squares has another credit from Rare on it, as far as the audio-visual department is concerned. At its core, it's essentially Tic Tac Toe with trivia questions deciding who gets each square. On the television show itself, real celebrities of the time would presumably reside in each square. The game does not recreate this. The nine squares are filled with random, wisecracking nobodies. No Michael Jackson or Alec Baldwin or whoever else would be on this show in 1989. Not even any fake celebrity names. Just Mary and Daz and Val and friends.

The idea of pretending to be on a game show is nothing new. I had a home version of Wheel Of Fortune as a child. I had fun with it, but there is a major flaw, one that prevents it from being a true reconstruction; you're going to play it more than once. The game cartridge or included home version material has a finite amount of questions and answers. The real deal has writers coming up with new queries every week. I only played Hollywood Squares once. That is how things would have really gone, were I a contestant in 1989. I would not get to play at my leisure, or learn the questions. Our reconstruction is yet again flawed... yet, it tries. Oh how it does try.

A few moments of my experience on Hollywood Squares stick out to me, the first being this question here. The tether is powered by memory, and the memory cheats, as you may know. In 1989, this is nothing more than a trivia question. What do these things have in common? In 2013, they are alchemic ingredients. By nothing more than putting the words together, you get a formula... and that formula is a summons of the beast NOSTALGIA. Half of our formula has been stolen and exploited by Michael Bay in a bid for billions. That should tell you how powerful alchemy and nostalgia are. An equivalent exchange. The memories of the masses, for the millions of the master. The dread beast NOSTALGIA will sit in the furthest reaches of space for now. Its gravity may pull us into its orbit from time to time. Be cautious, lovelies.

Then we have the prizes. I assumed I was simply playing for points against the CPU, but in round 2 something happened. My CPU opponent was given a task; to find a secret square. If she answered the question correctly, she would win a trip to Australia. Related to this tangent, when I won the game, I was given a choice of 5 keys. I chose one, and was then shown 5 cars. My task was to choose a car, and use the key I had chosen. If the key worked, the car was mine. These elements are obviously taken from the real-world show, but they are meaningless here. The fact that neither I nor the computer won the trip or car is irrelevant. Even if we had, what would it have accomplished? "Oh, I won the game and a new car. Neat." I would have thought. A brief imagining of me driving the vehicle would then pop into my mind, dispelled a few moments later by the obvious reality; this is a video game and not a real game show. It's not even like a board game, where one is rewarded with pieces of paper made to resemble money. It is simply text rendered by a video game console from 1985. "YOU'VE WON A NEW CAR.". The words themselves have no alchemy. Not like Decepticons and Transformers. I was a contestant on a game show, and I won nothing except imaginary money.

Which brings us, of course, to Home Alone on the NES. Our first movie game, but not our last... because the sequel will be dealt with momentarily. This game, surprisingly, has a credit by Bethesda Software. This surprises me. This game also, surprisingly enough, fits snugly into our theme of realism and reconstruction. It is a reconstruction of the events of the 1990 holiday classic, of course. A young boy in a house under siege by two criminals, using household items to stun them and stall them, to protect the home from burglary in the absence of adults. This is a fantasy situation concocted for the purposes of a family friendly Christmas comedy, of course. Put a real child in that situation, and they would never survive the onslaught. Why would they? An adult criminal is faster. Stronger. Relentless. One touch and the child is as good as dead. The house is looted.

Home Alone is a pillar of realism. The game expects you to survive the onslaught of its crooks for twenty minutes. My best time was three and a half. The house is small, and to win you end up walking in circles, laying traps when appropriate. It feels like a relic that somehow jumped forward in time. This game belongs to 1980, not 1991. Plus, you know, it's not very good. I had to look up a FAQ to figure out how to take and set traps. Looking at the FAQ also reveals that I discovered the optimal route to beat the game. All I had to do was continue to walk in circles, taking my route, for twenty minutes. Set traps when a crook is near and you win. To this I say, no thanks. Home Alone is our first movie game. It is our first bad game. Our second of each will probably be its sequel.

Home Alone 2... well, it is a movie game. It is bad. I will tell you what it's not, though. A pillar of realism. Somehow, in between games... we have fallen out of the world. Home Alone 2 is a video game. An electronic portal to a world where suitcases and vacuum cleaners are alive. Where mops hop in place, where maids throw blood-stained pillows, where suction-tipped dart guns stun. It's not a very good game at all, and lacks anything holding it together. Devoid of design, a reaction to the realism of its prequel. I almost wanted to continue playing to see how ridiculous things could get... but some worlds are better left uncharted. Best left to the imagination. Like the free trip to Australia. Or a new car.