Simpsons: A great TV show, a terrible game medium.

Now before you make a judgement about me because of my very low rating of this game, realize that I love watching the Simpsons. So any negativity from this is soley based on the game being terrible and not because I am a simpsons-hater.

Where to begin with this. Honestly I don't know. I usually like to talk about the positive aspects of a game first in my reviews but honestly there aren't a whole lot of them. So first lets run through the categories:

Graphics: I have some mixed feelings about the overall graphics in the game. At first I expected graphics to be bright, bland and cartoon-like. Well, the game came through on that. If the Simpsons ever went completly 3D on their TV show this is how I would expect to see them. Actually the most impressive graphics display in the game is the title screen where a few tire tracks appear and the 'road rage' logo bursts through the screen. What seriously killed me about this game is the fact that there were FRAMERATE STUTTERS on some of the movies! I honestly don't know how this could happen as there obviously aren't a whole lot of textures or bumpmapping going on. For the power the XBox posseses, this should have never happened. And to accompany those frame stutters are horrendous load times before and after the levels. The load times were still there even if you just wanted to replay a level you just tried.

Sound: I was hoping for what this game lacked in graphics it made up for in the sound department as simpsons dialogue. Well, the dialogue was there but there wasn't near as much of it as it should have been. Characters quickly became quite repetetive even though there were extra sound bytes done by the simpsons voice actors exclusively for this game. I also would have like to heard a lot more renditions of the theme song from the Simpsons. It would have been great to have the theme turned into rock, indie, country, etc. versions of the original. With a 9 gig DVD to work with and not much going on in the graphics area of the game, they should have loaded this up with as much audio simpsons humor as they could muster.

Gameplay: The Simpsons Road Rage is equal to Crazy Taxi with a cartoon license. At most the actual gameplay was mildly entertaining. With the entire point of the game being picking people up and dropping them off, I couldn't play this game for more than 10 minutes without giving up. Now and then it adds a little spice by offering a bonus if you avoid traffic or destroying objects, but its not enough to make it a fun single player game. It does have a 2 player head to head mode, but its pretty much the same as normal mode except you can steal they other players passenger. The only reason I continued to play this game at all was to listen to the characters audio clips. But once they started repeating (which didn't take long) there was very little to keep me playing. I played long enough to unlock a couple of my favorite characters so I could hear their sound clips and to unlock the car homer designed for his brother in a simpsons episode. After I took care of that, which took all of 30 or 40 minutes, it was goodbye Road Rage.

So by lacking in sound and replay value, this game is one that I am sorry I even rented. I may have rated it as 'average' if there were more multiplayer options, but there wasn't, so the game sucked. Honestly its not that big of a suprise, though. Just about every simpsons game ever made for video game consoles have done bad and just not been a lot of fun. The only Simpsons game that I have ever thouroughly enjoyed was the early 90's arcade game. So its time for me to toss this one into the pile of simpsons games never to play again. But who knows, maybe you are a simpsons memorabilia collector or an off duty cabby who gets off on playing things like this. If so, go check it out.