Tread Lightly: Poor Game Ahead

Author's Rating:

Pros: Momentarily entertaining (with friends), occasionally good sound

Cons: Poor graphics, poorer gameplay, even poorer replay value

The Bottom Line: 
Don't get it; if you _must_ play it, rent it: the game's only high point is its sound. Everything else is just bad (or worse).

Author's Review
My friends and I popped in a rented copy of Simpsons Wrestling, turned the Playstation on, sat down, and prepared to vicariously beat each other senseless with familiar Simpsons characters.

We had high hopes. Indeed, none of us had read any reviews on the game, so none of us knew that the gaming world at large hated Simpsons Wrestling with a passion.

We were about to find out why they hated it -- the hard way.

The opening screens looked well-drawn (particularly that gorilla screen). The title screen looked very slick, very true-to-Simpsons-form. We pressed start, selected versus mode, and chose our characters, Homer and Willy, from those available to us (four question marks at the end indicated hidden characters). The character portraits much resembled their counterparts on the show, but with some minor pixelation... but that was to be expected. Still promising.

The screen turned black to a loading screen, complete with a miniature Itchy and Scratchy repeatedly hitting each other with mallets. Cute, definitely cute.

Then we saw what we were going to be playing with, and our hopes fell. Fast. The box made the game look good -- and indeed, if you're looking at it far enough away, it _does_ look good. The problem is, we were sitting a few feet away from the TV, and it looked horrible. Homer looked like he'd been drawn by an aspiring artist with a significant lack of talent. Willy looked like he'd been hit with the ugly stick (many, many times). They moved spastically, like the animators had forgotten to draw in key frames.

Then we started playing.

Oh, learning the controls was fine -- easy, even. It wasn't five minutes before we were able to play the game comfortably. However, the game didn't allow for much variety in movement or attacks: each character has about a total of six moves: one hand-to-hand, one projectile (usually), and one "super" move, and the associated grappling moves.

Hitting each other is difficult: the game's atrocious collision-detection and mishmash of cartoonish sprites makes it difficult to tell who's hitting whom. After getting enough exclamation-points-in-thought-bubbles, or after knocking your opponent down enough times, you get to taunt. Taunting makes your character say something (snipped from some Simpsons episode) and turn invincible for about a minute. The sound is decent (even good, sometimes), but everything else just... isn't. Fighting another human is a test of patience, nothing more: there's no strategy to the game, save learning cheap tricks to get each other killed more quickly.

We eventually tired of the game's versus mode, and set out to unlock characters in single-player mode. That's where we found that the game's AI is primitive, poor, and even cheaper than we were: boss-battles against Smithers are annoying at best, while fighting other characters is an exercise in repetition: punch, punch, punch, run away, special attack, jump, punch, punch... or some other combination thereof.

Soon, we unlocked the Bumblebee Man.

Then we played some more, and unlocked Moe.

Then we struggled through even more of the game (the difficulty levels get significantly more difficult after the first level), and got Professor (?) Frink.

We're still trying to get Flanders... I don't know _why_ we're spending so much time playing such a poor game.

My friends and I determined that Simpsons Wrestling is the most fun when you're learning how to play it.

After that, it's all downhill.