I picked up my copy for the Gamecube today. There are also versions for both the Xbox and PS2, if I’m not mistaken.
The most notable features of the game are that it has a new story penned by Simpsons writers, and it has lots of amusing new voiceovers by the cast. (Whiney Homer: “He used a cheat code!”) The town is also chock full of Simpsons memories. Frostilicus is in the freezer at the Kwiky Mart. You can plow your car through a field of tomacco. The mission I’m playing now has Bart going to the Try-and-Save to pick up a copy of “BoneStorm.”
Yeah, the game does play a bit like GTA 3. There’s really nothing new here in terms of gameplay, but no Simpsons game has ever offered anything new in that category. Their last one was a Crazy Taxi clone. Not bad. Better than the Simpsons Arcade Game from 1991. But still not enough original Simpsons content to make it worth the money.
This game does have that, IMHO, and it’s pretty fun to boot. Granted, I’ve only played it for a couple hours, so I don’t know how the replay value is going to be, but I like it.
I didn’t mean to say that the arcade game was bad - in fact, most of my eighth grade lunch money was converted to quarters and pumped into one of those machines. Just that Simpsons games have come a long way in terms of original content since then. Yeah, if that’s what I meant, I probably should have phrased it that way in the OP, shouldn’t I?
The worst Simpsons game was, without question, Bart vs. the Space Mutants for the NES, which came out around the same time as the arcade game, was nothing like the arcade game, and totally sucked.
Do not get the Xbox version, despite IGN stating it’s better. I picked it up today for Xbox, but it has this hella annoying refresh quirk (which is apparently more the fault of Xbox’s video card) which causes objects to shift around. I found it very distracting and I’m going to return it tomorrow for the GameCube version.
