Simpsons: Hit and Run - "Dude, I NEED this Game!"

Author's Rating:

Pros: great gameplay, lots of items to collect and unlock, audio is awesome

Cons: multi-player game is really pitiful, some missions are incredibly frustrating

The Bottom Line: 
This game is hilarious and has great gameplay, and if not for a few frustrating missions and a bad multi-player, this would be a five star game.

Author's Review
The Simpsons is a hilarious show that most of us have watched at one point in our lives, and it has provided us with many laughs. The video games that are based on the show, on the other hand, have produced impeccably horrendous ratings. The only Simpsons game that I have previously played was Road Rage, and although I enjoyed it, there were some problems with it. Well, now a new Simpsons game has been published, The Simpsons: Hit and Run, the so-called Graft Theft Auto clone. I have been really looking forward to play this game and immediately rented it when I got the chance to.

The plot is very original. In the town of Springfield, weird things have begun to happen. There are mechanical bees with cameras everywhere, as well as strange black vans. A new soda, Buzz Cola, has been created and it is controlling the minds of the inhabitants of Springfield. Soon you will learn that the town is being spied on for a very interesting reason, involving television, aliens, crop circles and Krusty. It is up to a few good citizens to set things straight.

This game consists of seven levels total. Each level has seven missions, one bonus mission as well three races. Therefore, there are 49 missions, 7 bonus missions and 21 races for you to complete. In the game, you get to control Homer, Bart, Marge, Lisa and even Apu. Homer and Bart get two missions apiece, while the others get just one.

As you control each character, before you is the huge city of Springfield. The city is split into the sections, and you can’t explore the entire city with just one character, but each third of the city has enough places to make your head spin. You will recognize many famous places, such as the school, the Kwik-E-Mart and the Power Plant. However, by exploring each place you will finally learn where each landmark is located in correlation to the other places. You will also find a lot of nifty places, such as the Tomacco field, the Comic Book shop and the dock area. You can walk area virtually everywhere, and even enter various buildings. To make it seem a tad like a platformer, you can run, jump and double jump. To make things a bit more violent, you can kick objects and even people, yet there is no blood or death in this game. Interacting with some of the famous characters is fun, and talking to Ralph is outright hilarious.

To make things more fun, you can drive a car. Each character can drive, and is assigned an elementary vehicle in the beginning of each mission. However, you can step out of the car and switch cars. This can be done by finding one of the numerous telephone booths spread all over the city and accessing a vehicle that you already own. Or, you can ‘jack’ any other car that you see. However, the main difference between GTA is that in Hit and Run, you do not actually jack cars, the townsfolk give you rides whenever you need one. If you drive recklessly and hit a lot of objects, then you car will get banged up, then will smoke and can eventually blow up. When a car blows up you lose some coins and need to spend a few coins to repair it. There is also a Hit and Run meter on the bottom right-hand corner. The more objects and people that you hit, the closer it gets to becoming red, and if “Hit and Run” flashes on the screen, the cops will be after you and if they catch you, you are hit with a 50 coin fine. Vehicles differ in their speed, acceleration, toughness and handling.

As I have stated, there are 49 missions in this game. Most of the missions involve racing others to a certain destination, collecting items, or destroying various vehicles. To make missions harder, more than half of them are timed. Some involve racing, collecting, and getting away in a certain time limit. As you can probably tell, the missions do get repetitive, however, by controlling different characters, doing virtually the same thing doesn’t get stale. Only, I must warn you that some missions in the second half of the game are extremely frustrating. If you fail any part of a mission, you usually have to start from the beginning (of the mission). Some of them very extremely difficult for some reason (usually a lack of time) and it took either a lot of luck or more than an hour of frustration to finally move on. But overall, I enjoyed completing them. The seven bonus missions usually involve collecting items for some people around Springfield, and if you complete them, you gain access to another vehicle.

To compete in a race (21 total), you must find Ralph, Nelson or Millhouse in the city. Each one of them hosts a race (Patty and Selma actually paid them to do it for them), and there are three different types of races. One involves doing one huge lap around the city, ending up in first overall and not blowing up your car. Another involves finishing first after racing against three other cars in a 3-5 laps race, and the final one involves crossing the finish line before a set time expires. The races are fun but challenging at first, but when you get better cars, winning races will become much easier. If you win all three races on a level, you gain access to a special vehicle.

When exploring the city, you are bound to find some coins. Coins are the games currency. Some of them are just floating about the city. You also get a coin or two by running over or destroying objects in the city, such as telephone booths, fire hydrants, or by smashing Buzz Cola boxes and Buzz Cola machines. By smashing these, you get approximately 30 coins. With your coins, you can buy various objects. First of all, this game has a lot of vehicles, 35 overall, I think. Some of them are gained automatically, others are rewards for winning races or completing bonus races. However, the rest must be bought with you coins. Vehicles cost between 150 and 1000 coins. My favorite vehicle was Bart’s red Ferrini, although I loved Mr. Burns’ Limo and Apu’s Longhorn. You can also purchase outfits with your hard-earned coins. Each level has three new outfits to be purchased; therefore there are 21 in total. Costumes such as Bartman for Bart, the American outfit for Apu or Cop Marge will bring back some memories from the TV show. Some of the outfits and cars are necessary to complete specific tasks!

Remember the mechanical bees with cameras? Well, there are 20 of those per level. If you smash them by jumping and kicking, they will explode and you get a bunch of coins. In the later levels, bees gain shields and you must kick them twice before they explode. There are 140 bees in total and finding all of them to complete the game 100% is no easy task. The game also features 84 gags. Gags are found by pressing the Y button next to a blue glowing object. These gags are all related to Simpsons episodes. If you go to Moe’s, you can light the drinks on fire. If you go to the Flanders’ backyard, you will find a bomb shelter, where Todd will say a funny phrase.

The game also has 49 collectable cards (7 per level), which are scattered throughout Springfield. Finding them is easier than finding all of the gags and bees. Each collectable card has a picture of an object from past Simpson’s episodes (such as the Mr. Sparkle Box, Crab Juice from NY or Homer’s Mr. Plow Jacket). There is a description of the object beside it, and indicator that shows which episode it came from, as well as a quote from one of the characters that is related to it. If you collect every single card in the game, which isn’t too hard, then you will unlock a brand-new “Itchy and Scratchy” cartoon. Besides that cartoon, there are 6 more than are unlocked after beating key missions.

There is also a bonus game that you can unlock. The bonus games support multi-player (up to 4 human or CPU characters), in which you pick characters, a track and race around the certain track for a certain number of laps. This game is outright horrible due to the fact that the entire track takes up only the screen itself, so what you get is a miniature track. Unless you have a huge TV, this is laughable, not fun at all and angered me slightly. To unlock tracks, you need to collect all of the cards on a level, and after collecting all of the cards on the first level, and after expected so much, I got a piece of jump. This would have been much better if they did a split-screen race option.

Your entire game progress is tracked in a scrapbook, and to complete the game 100%, you must beat every single mission, bonus mission and race, destroy every mechanical bee, watch every movie, find every gag, and collect every car, collectable card and outfit. This is obviously quite a challenge. Personally, I beat the game 95.6% during my one week rent. However, I played this game a lot, approximately 25 hours. So this game will take quite a while to fully beat and surprisingly, I have the urge to play this game again, so the replay value is quite high in my opinion.

Graphically, this game looks terrific. At first sight, it is a bit weird to see the Simpsons family in 3D, but the transition was fairly fluid. Every character looks almost exactly like they do on the show, and it is appealing to Simpsons fans. The city of Springfield itself is magical in every aspect, and the enormous city looks just like I imagined it to be. All of the buildings and landmarks look great, yet this still have a nice cartoonish feel to them. The cars are the highlight of the graphical department, and they all look fairly real. The presentation was very Simpsons-oriented and just right. As a bonus, on Christmas, Thanksgiving and Halloween, the main changes from the main theme to a theme that is based on that holiday, which is just a little extra treat for owners of the game.

The sound department is very this game shines. First of all, the background music changes for every character in every circumstance. When playing Lisa, you get jazz music in the background, while with Bart you get rock music. The music fits in with the gameplay extremely well. The sound effects are nothing special, because the crashes, explosions, bumps and screeches are common in most games. However, what separates this game from others is the fact that all of the people that do the dialogue on the actual show went to a recording studio and did the voices for this game! This gives the game a very authentic feel, and makes it more hilarious, more fun and gives it a real Simpsons feel. The dialogue in this game, ranging from the various lines shouted while driving a car or the dialogue during a movie or when you are assigned a task is just perfect. Hearing Dr. Nick say “Hey, everybody!”, Apu say “Move it, cracker” or “Collecting useless objects makes me feel so American”, or Homer scream “I am evil Homer… I am evil Homer” and “Learn how to drive, dumbass” is just priceless.

Overall, Simpsons: Hit and Run is a masterpiece of a Simpsons game. You do not have to be a fan of the show to appreciate the gameplay and humor. Although this game did borrow some elements from GTA, I do not think it is alike too much, and this might be good news for some. I found this game to be extremely fun, and a game such as this was really lacking for Xbox owners. I recommend this game to Simpsons fans, heck, I think it’s a crime if you are a fan of the show not to give this game a spin. Otherwise, people who want a humorous game or GTA style game should also rent or buy this. This game won the 2003 GameSpot Funniest Game award, and I think that it really deserves it.