Down With Mr. Burns

The Simpsons television show has had a huge run. After all of these years, it still gets strong enough ratings to be part of Fox’s Sunday night lineup. And with the recent onslaught of Simpsons merchandising, it’s clearly still a strong brand in the eyes of retailers everywhere.

Unfortunately for gamers, video games based on the Simpsons haven’t always been of the same quality. Will things be any different with the first XBox Simpons title? Well that first title is The Simpsons Road Rage. It just found a home on the XBox, there are also versions for the PS2 and the Gamecube already.

Road Rage

Here in South Florida, road rage incidents run high; with accidents often gracing the evening news. And so it would seem with video games this season as well. Just while visiting my family during the holidays I enjoyed running people down in Grand Theft Auto 3 (PS2) and smashing slow moving traffic in sunny San Francisco while playing Crazy Taxi (Gamecube). Thanks a lot, Santa. Now add to that; listening to Bart make his famous crude comments while driving Apu to the Quickie Mart in The Simpsons Road Rage.

This title could easily be called The Simpsons Crazy Taxi, but I’m sure Sega would not have let them. Much of the gameplay is exactly identical. In the Road Rage game type, you must pilot your vehicle through the various maps, picking up passengers and dropping them off at their desinations. You have a time limit, which gets increased for every passenger that you pick up.

The Sunday Drive game type allows you to just cruise around any of the locations around Springfield. This in itself is great fun if you’ve ever wondered what Springfield looked like. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of their rendition though.

There is also a Mission Mode where you can play through missions with different characters. The missions revolve around a storyline where Mr. Burns is trying to control the towns transit responsibilities with his nuclear powered buses. The missions are of two types: destroy n number of item x in t amount of time and bring your passenger to their destination while avoiding Burns in t amount of time. These missions are quite different from the stunt missions of Crazy Taxi, but they’re definitely fun. Now for the bad news; there are only ten missions that you can easily finish in 45 minutes. Finishing those missions unlock a special item. Yipee!

Multiplayer

The last game type is Head to Head, which is a multiplayer format. This is a blast, and perhaps the most redeeming aspect of the game. It’s pretty limited when it comes to multiplayer variations. Basically it’s just Capture the Flag, where there is only one flag and it’s a customer. Delivering that patron gives you $1000, in a game to either $5k, $10k or $15k. There’s only one patron at a time, so if your opponent picked them up, you can ram them and their passenger ends up in your car.

Control

Compared to other taxi driving games (Crazy Taxi is the only one I can think of) the control scheme is pretty simple. You’ve got the typical gas and brake, but brake is combined with reverse. This means there’s no quick shifts from reverse to drive, which is the basis of the special moves that you can execute in Crazy Taxi, like the Crazy Dash. Well without these special moves, the game’s control scheme is rather elementary.

However there is a button for horn and a button for handbrake. The handbrake saves this simple control scheme from certain demise by allowing you to significantly tighten your turning radius. And when you use Homer, you get the games one special move, DOHnuts. Hold the gas and handbrake while turning to execute sweet donuts. Any character can actually do a donut, but with Homer it takes on new meaning. Beside the donuts and tight turns, the handbrake is also used well to kick out your backend when you’re destroying obstacles in the missions. This keeps you from slowing down too much.

Graphics

It took me a little while, but I finally got used to this game’s 3D graphics. You would think that they would have used cell shading for the whole game, but they opted towards a typical 3D world with goroud shaded figures. Most of the textures were kept simple with mostly solid colors reminiscent of cartoons. Then they added an interesting quirk, the vehicles that your characters drive are cell shaded (Jet Grind Radio or Cell Damage are good examples of games using cell shading). I actually liked this 3D look after a while. The graphics were not breakthrough by any means, but they fit the game rather nicely.

The XBox ran this title with all of it’s fast paced action perfectly. It never studdered. But I have to wonder why the game has such horrible load times. There’s a lot of map data to be loaded since it seems everything is loaded up front for the large areas, but why do they have to go through this load even if you’re just restarting a level? This frustrated me so much I was yelling at the television until I was hoarse when I played Lisa Simpson’s mission.

Simpsons Mania

This game lacks any gameplay enhancements over Crazy Taxi in the Road Rage game mode. Beyond that, it has Head to Head and Mission Mode, which are certainly fun. But what is there to keep you playing? In a smart decision, the game was expanded, driving the player to continue playing to unlock the numerous extras: 6 areas, 18 different drivers, and extra cars. To top it off, you’ll get bonus drivers if you play on Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s Day (Set your XBox’s date if you can’t wait). In all actuality, this may not be very compelling to most, but it’s a considerable improvement over Crazy Taxi.

If the desire to unlock everything doesn’t keep you in front of your XBox, then maybe those famous Simpsons’ anecdotes might.

“Dumbass.” - Homer talking to Grandpa

“Can you take me to my shack? I need some willie time.” – Willie

“Please take me to the grocery store. Their low prices make me laugh.” – Apu

But alas, after playing an hour of Sunday Drive, you’ve heard them all. So the game has quite a bit of charm, but it’s not really high on my list because of its simplicity, its frustrating load times, and its lack of depth.