"The Simpsons - Hit and Run" retrospective review

 

It's funny to see Matt Groening himself bringing up the subject of a Simpsons game, but it's even funnier that he happened to pick on a game that had been creeping back into my Mastodon feed over the last couple of weeks. Almost as if the bearded cartoon genius (hopefully not still incarcerated in a Nicaraguan jail) was reading my toots!

It spurred me to dig out the PS2 and my rather battered copy of "The Simpsons: Hit and Run" - probably one of the finest uses of the Simpsons license to ever be applied to a game. Sure, people wax lyrical about The Simpsons arcade game (and yeah, I did love playing that alongside a couple of mates, our ability to battle through level after level as Bart, Homer and...er...Marge was unprecedented). But Hit and Run was the don, a game that riffed on Grand Theft Auto 3 at a time where GTA clones were something of a rarity (now everyone's doing it, and still doing it badly). "Hit and Run" placed you in the clumpy shoes of Homer Simpson, tasked with driving around a miniature version of Springfield, complete with all the sights and sounds of that stinky little backwater town including Apu's Kwik-E-Mart, the Nuclear Power Plant, and of course Montgomery Burns' palatial mansion and casino. 

The game starts off well, throwing you straight behind the wheel of Homer's trusty old rustbucket to go and get some "Ice cream containing miniature pies" (which sounds like a GREAT idea) and some cola. So off you race, trying not to incur the wrath of the local (inept) law enforcement by running over too many innocent citizens or trashing too much public property. 

"Marge, we need to talk, I don't find you sexually attractive any more!"

For the time (the game launched in 2003, just 2 years after GTA 3), the graphics were absolutely on-point, capturing not only the colours and palettes of Springfield and its yellow-skinned champions, but the whole look and feel of an episode of the show. NPCs bumble around, largely minding their own business but from time to time allowing you to interact with them. Sight gags can be triggered by your character, for additional giggles, but it's the vehicle handling and driving action that is the heart of the game, and it's actually ridiculously good considering that quite a few modern games can't even get it right. So your cars are tail-happy, can be spun on a dime with a quick stab of the handbrake button, and can incur damage if you treat them too roughly (thankfully a repair is a golden-spanner-collect-away so you can always repair your stricken vehicle fairly easily before it gets completely trashed). 

One curious thing about the game that I'd entirely forgotten is that each character is contained within a set of tasks in each level, and you only get to save your game as each character completes their chapter. So no auto-save here, and no manual save either (Even GTA III made you tediously return to your home base before the series adopted Auto-Save with GTA IV). 

As you progress through the game you can pick up coins to purchase new vehicles or outfits for your characters. Some of the vehicle purchases are mandatory to complete certain missions, so it becomes a bit tedious as you hunt around for coins to pick up Mr Plow or a School Bus. 

Other missions are tight on time, or require racing other characters to a given destination, but the action is fast and furious, and the humour never misses a beat (the voiceovers are brilliant, voiced of course by the original actors). 

Back in the day, Vivendi published a stack of great games, and this is no exception. It's highly polished and even though my poor old PS2 sounded like it was going to fly apart (this was from the era where games weren't installed to HD, and were 'streamed' from the optical drive, so very noisy and prone to a bit of frame-dropping). It probably didn't help that my copy was inexplicably scratched to buggery, which is unusual as I always look after my games (though I did later recall that it was a traded-in copy I picked up for a couple of quid, so I guess I can't really complain, at least it still works and the case / cover weren't too battered). 

The Simpsons: Hit and Run might well get an official remake one day (if Groening wasn't just winding everyone up) but until then, the original is definitely one of the best Simpsons games ever, and if you can suspend your disbelief that Bart Simpson driving a weird little Space Shuttle 'cart' can be anything but a dire menace on the roads, you'll get a heap of enjoyment out of replaying this.