The very weird 2007 ‘Simpsons’ game
February 2, 2023
Adult animated television, for the most part, is terrible.
It’s a weird sentiment that a mere 10 years ago people were craving for more adult-oriented animation after a saturated era of 2000s schlock, with CGI kids movies and the mass consolidation of Disney’s box-office presence in the market, making adult avenues for the medium even more scarce.
For every “Cyberpunk: Edge Runners” there’s a half dozen Family Guy clones cheaply animated and raunchier than a bad SNL skit. Nonetheless, “The Simpsons” has remained alive and kicking since 1989, despite the series already making jokes about itself being past its prime by the 2000s.
Weirdly, “The Simpsons” has a shockingly well received plethora of video game adaptations throughout the decades, and I say decades as it spans all the way back to the 90s with the Super Nintendo and arcade classics being fondly remembered by Chuck E. Cheese birthday attendees worldwide.
The final, legitimate Simpsons game before abruptly ceasing any and all titles in favor of a microtransaction-ridden mobile game is 2007’s “The Simpsons Game,” published by EA and released to market off the wildly successful “The Simpsons Movie” from the same year.
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Released on a ludicrous amount of systems, everything from the PlayStation 2 to the Nintendo DS, The Simpsons game is a third person platformer with an original story of the iconic yellow family going on a wacky adventure across the universe of video games. Remarkably, it wasn’t just four hours of Mario and Zelda jokes a granduncle could laugh at, but a surprisingly comedic stab at various high profile titles and publishers of the time.
The main story follows Bart discovering “The Simpson Game’s” manual and wreaking havoc with an assortment of video game cheats and powers. Then everything from an alien invasion, a dolphin uprising, to even a Dance Dance Revolution battle with God comes your way. Humor has the same tone of the show (debatably), consisting of slapstick, out-of-left-field crude humor and more parody than plot at times.
Gameplay wise- the game is very run of the mill. It’s actually remarkably similar to the structure of a Lego game, with you switching between multiple characters to solve puzzles and fight enemies with relatively basic beat’em up combat. You’ll be fighting with the camera and lock-on mechanics more than the braindead enemies at times, but it gets the job done.
So on a gameplay scale the game is pretty weak, but the sheer amount of insane levels and parodies going on as the plot progresses is the really reason you should try this 16 years later.
A later level setting has you in a bizarre Pokémon parody, and also had a level where you’re beating up EA’s Will Wright, game designer and co-founder of Maxis Software (of “The Sims” fame) after he tries to kill your whole family in a fire.
Yeah, I can’t really top that. If that even mildly interests or disturbs you, “The Simpsons Game” is worth a play
The Simpsons Game is available on PSP, PS2, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, PS3 and Wii.