Shit this looks like Yume Nikki lmao

@Magic Mike Matei This game came out in 1992. It’s possible (perhaps even likely, given the year that it was released) that the Old House was inspired by the uncle’s house in the second film as you suggested, but anything beyond that is highly unlikely. John Hughes wrote the first three films. If he had been working on the script for the third film (released in 1997) for that long, it definitely doesn’t seem like it when looking at the finished product. The scripts for the fourth one and beyond were probably crapped out in a weekend as well, and Hughes wasn’t involved with any of them.

I have a theory in regards to all five houses being based on the five Home Alone movies. The McCallister Mansion is from the first movie, the old house is based on the abandoned building in the second movie, the country house is based on Alex Pruitt's house from Home Alone 3. The Ultra Modern House is based on Natalie Kalban's mansion in Home Alone 4 due to the similarities of both having futuristic gadgets, and the Colonial House is based on the fifth and more recent Home Alone movie.

@Murphmario Kinda tricky regarding the Genesis as it all depends on how much VRAM space is left. Cartridge space is also an issue as a vast majority of Genesis games use a form of compression, not sure about this game.

Having just checked Home Alone via a VDP viewer, there's lots of empty VRAM space (not even half is used and more only during the inventory screen) so more sprites/background tiles could have been added. Then again most US developers at the time outside of EA, Midway and a couple of others weren't exactly known for technical expertise which is why a majority of games during the 16 bit era were either Japanese or European developed (Acclaim outsourced a lot of their games to British developers, Software Creations did a lot of stuff for companies including Nintendo), or getting British developers to work in the US. There was also Sculptured Software however they mainly did SNES stuff. Sega also contracted a 3rd party developer for this game and imagine that they didn't have much time to polish it off (think Sega of America told developers 4 months to develop and release a game).

Was there really not enough space to make cliffside tiles instead of just repeating the same 32x32 tree tile over and over again?