We have levels in which Marge tries to ban and then clean-up a controversial game called Grand Theft Scratchy – no prizes for guessing the subject there. We get sections inspired by Medal of Honor, Shadow of the Colossus, fantasy RPGs and classic platform games. In fact, video games are the subject of the satire and the inspiration for many of the levels.
THE SIMPSONS GAME PS3 PC SERIES
If you know and love the series – and who doesn’t – you can’t help but be impressed by how well it’s all been put together.Īnd The Simpsons Game goes one better because it comes from a team that also clearly knows and loves video games.
THE SIMPSONS GAME PS3 PC TV
You’re not getting a selection of catch-phrases thrown at you willy-nilly, you’re getting the sort of smart, knowing dialogue you’d expect to hear from your TV screen, and deployed with a certain degree of wit. The characters look right, and with the voices from the show, sound spot-on as well. The Simpsons Game resembles a moving flat cartoon with the series trademark basic linework and rudimentary shading, even though it’s fully rendered in 3D. Here, the graphics are an uncanny replication of the cartoon style. We’ve had enough lazy rip-offs where the characters and an approximation of the visual style are taped onto an existing game design. Lesser stuff than this has brought big games down before.īut The Simpsons keeps on earning itself a break just by playing so close to the look, feel and attitude of the series. And while you’re wishing, you might also wish for a less badly behaved camera, and for it to be easier to trigger certain actions when you’re only just out of the right zone. You can’t help feeling that a lot of the work gone in building the city and its more notorious locations will probably go to waste. The platforming isn’t particularly challenging, the solutions to the puzzles are handed to you on a plate (curse you, in-game hint bubbles) and you can’t help wishing that someone had looked at the way the city is handled in Crackdown – as an open-world playground where collecting bonuses brings real game benefits – and applied that to Springfield. In these, you can only play as one of two family members, switching between them at will in order to solve puzzles or use particular abilities. Disappointingly, however, this is little more than a framework for a selection of themed and rather linear levels.
You’ll be playing as all four speaking members of the Simpsons family, and Springfield itself provides a free-roaming environment through which to wander and collect bonus items. OK, so it’s fundamentally a 3D platform adventure game – the weakest and most obvious choice for any licensed property with family appeal. I suspect that if you love the show, you might have the same reaction. On the other hand, I have to admit I’ve enjoyed it. It is a game where you can see the missed opportunities, and where it sometimes tries to be too clever for its own good. Yes, The Simpsons Game has some really horrible flaws, and I can’t say that it’s consistently great throughout.
However, this time it doesn’t, and I won’t. Frankly, the fact that The Simpsons Game is selling huge numbers at this moment should make me want to vent my spleen all over this page. Twisting the knife for us is the fact that it comes from EA a company known for producing licensed games with high-production values, but occasionally with little regard for originality, quality or the original source material. Instead they buy The Simpsons Game because they know the name and they know the characters. Or they could or saving their pennies for Super Mario Galaxy or Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction. Those people could be out buying The Orange Box or Metroid Prime 3 or Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. We know it’s going to sell millions, and many of those to people who buy two or three games a year at the most. You can see the same thing when games reviewers look at a game like this one. The critic can’t help wishing the crowds would go and see or buy something more worthy, but at the same time they know that whatever they say isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference. You can see it every time some broadsheet film critic goes to see something like Transformers.
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You can see it every time a band like Coldplay releases an album and the critics sulk that people who aren’t really music fans are picking it up when they do their weekly shop at Tesco. It’s a sad fact that most critics have a love/hate relationship with the public at large. ”’Platforms: PS3, PS2, PSP, DS, Wii, Xbox 360 – PS3 version reviewed.”’
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