The Simpsons: Hit & Run

The Good
I liked the fact that the game has an insane amount of replay value, as you can explore the levels at will and can look for the many things hidden throughout the levels, such as wasps, gags and hidden cars.

I also liked the fact that many of the characters from the series are in the game and you can play as the main characters such as Homer.

I liked the plot from the game as they put some thought into it and made the most of the characters.

The graphics are okay for its time, and the voice acting is on top form as it is the original cast, and there are lots of quotes from the show.

The music is also okay but there is not too much to say about this.

The Bad
I noticed that there are some major bugs, sometimes the car can fly off the road for no reason, or sometimes you can fall through the ground and get stuck.

Some of the missions are repetitive and the game will ask you to do many of these similar missions over and over in different levels, such as race to point X before Y does, or Collect X from Y.

I also noticed that the camera is a nightmare to control, sometimes it will move, sometimes it will not move, or not let you judge jumps appropriately thus leading to many frustrating falls and making missions harder.

After a while on a level, the quotes will get repeated over and over and can get quite annoying after a while.

The Bottom Line
I would say that The Simpsons Hit & Run is a great game that any Simpsons fan should have in their collection.

The Good
Do you like The Simpsons? Do you like GTA? Well, then you are going to love... oh, wait, that's not it. D'oh!

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, Hit & Run. The game in which you can run around virtual Springfield, collecting coins, which you can use to purchase... well, almost nothing actually, just some useless outfits and a few cars. I wish I could spend all this money on donuts. Mmmm... do-nuts...

Right. So what's really good in Hit & Run? Well, it's quite addictive. Almost like chocolate. Mmmmm... chocolate... You start the game, and immediately you can hop into your car and drive around Springfield as much as you want. You never have to think about your next objective. It's all driving, driving, and driving. And it's fun. For a while.

The city is re-created in all its glory in full 3D. Every part of Springfield you've ever seen on the show is here, and you can explore it. 3D Springfield is undeniably the star of the game. Driving around it, visiting familiar locations and discover others which weren't even shown in the TV series (but which fit its theme very well) is a more pleasant experience than following the game's story and missions.

Almost every character from the show you can think of appears in the game. And naturally, all the characters are voiced by the original cast. As far as fan service goes, Hit & Run certainly delivers - though more in quantity than in quality.

The driving itself is fun, and there is something strangely addictive in the game's ridiculous timed missions. You feel compelled to try "just one more time", until... well, until you really can't take it any more.

Destructible environments are perhaps what I liked most in this game. Nothing beats the feeling of methodically crushing everything you see. There are coins hidden pretty much everywhere; destroying poles, telephone booths, and other parts of the city while driving and getting money in the process is definitely the most exciting activity in the game. There are many places to explore; and if you are tired of driving, you can just run around on foot and kick the hell out of the environment.

There are plenty of collectible items to scavenge; people who care for this sort of thing will probably enjoy exploring every corner of the city for yet another Itchy & Scratchy coupon or whatever.

The timed missions are difficult, but the game is much more forgiving than GTA, since it allows you to restart a mission right away (without the annoying driving to destination), and even skip the mission entirely if you fail too many times! This is certainly a feature I would love to see in GTA games.

The Bad
Hit & Run was supposed to deliver us a double amount of fun: that of playing a free-roaming driving game, and that of experiencing high-quality comedy TV-like entertainment. Unfortunately, it fails on both fronts.

Let's first see why Hit & Run is not a very good Simpsons product. I belong to those old-timers for whom Season 3 of The Simpsons was the real deal. I loved the kind, not overly cynical humor of early Simpsons episodes, and its good storytelling - always with a moral meaning, though never didactic or preachy. It is true that the series had different writers, and many of them, especially during the later years, focused more on gags and grotesque and less on what made The Simpsons endearing to me in the first place. However, Hit & Run doesn't even reach the level of some of my less favorite episodes in terms of writing and narrative. It's neither warm and charming, nor amusingly nonsensical - it's just dumb. The plot is almost non-existent, and what is left of it is something that even the least sophisticated Simpsons episode would be ashamed of containing. The characters lack any personality beside assorted one-liners - granted, those are pretty much within the style of the show, but you can't make your writing depend on one-liners, just as you can't make your gameplay depend on timed races (and as we'll soon see, Hit & Run does both).

Playing Hit & Run doesn't feel like participating in a Simpsons experience. You don't get attached to Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa the way you did in the series' better episodes. It's also not particularly funny. I barely even smiled when I was playing the game. Sure, they've crammed the city with every Simpsons character and location imaginable, but what's the point if none of these characters and locales truly matters anything? The characters serve only as givers of inane missions, are not tied into the plot, and their appearances are nothing short of pointless. It's like they slapped the license over their game mechanically, without bothering to research what really made the show tick.

It is debatable whether the GTA template is the most fitting one to use for a Simpsons game. Driving and organized crime themes are hardly the trademark of that TV series. That said, I think even this template could have worked if it were used more smartly. Just like with the Simpsons license, the developers of Hit & Run didn't quite understand how GTA games really worked. They obviously thought it was enough to create a virtual city and let the player drive through it. They forgot that the meat and bones of every GTA game were the missions; it was the variety of the missions and the creativity of their design that elevated GTA games above most of its subsequent clones.

Alas, the makers Hit & Run paid no attention to that. The game's missions design is so bad that it borders on ridiculous. Without exaggerating, every mission belongs to one of the three possible templates: 1) race against another car; 2) race against time; and 3) collect X amount of items under a time limit. This inane collection of mind-numbingly repetitive, simplistic, arcadish tasks passes for actual gameplay in this game.

GTA games had a large variety of driving missions plus shooting missions. Obviously, there is no shooting in Hit & Run, but they didn't even bother to replace it with anything else. 99% of the time in Hit & Run is spent in a car, and 99% of that time is spend doing idiotic "missions" such as finding 30 monkeys under 3 minutes (seriously, I haven't made that one up). The example of Bully shows how deep and varied GTA-style gameplay can be without guns (and even without cars!), using a more family-friendly tone. But Hit & Run was created without any concept.

In GTA and in all other comparable games I can think of the missions had something to do with the story. The missions were a way to advance the story; even if their goals were remote from the main objective, they were still logical. Hit & Run lacks this kind of basic logic. The missions in this game have, for the most part, absolutely nothing to do with the story. In order to prevent the aliens from spying on humans with giant bee-like cameras, the Simpsons family has to participate in races and collecting games. Almost all the missions follow the same senseless formula: "I need to save Springfield!" - "Ok, but first help me to find 22 fishes under 2:35 minutes!" - "Okay!"... Mission is over, an equally senseless "talking heads" cutscene follows, and... you must meet character X at location Y! Why? Nobody knows, but the game tells you to! You head to character X, triggering another "cutscene" - "I'd answer your question, but first you'll have to drive to my home under 1:20 minutes! And then find character Z!"... and so on, and so on... there is no end to this, and that's how the entire game plays.

As appealing as virtual Springfield and its characters are, their graphical style is just your basic 3D. Many characters look weird in a three-dimensional outfit (my favorite character, Lisa, doesn't look like herself any more); in my opinion cel-shading would have worked much better here.

And... no mouse support for the PC version? You have to move the camera with Num keys? And you can't even move it up and down properly? And it takes forever to turn it right or left? Was there something wrong with my copy of the game?...

The Bottom Line
Hit & Run clearly proves that it takes more than mixing a great setting with a great gameplay concept to make a great game. It lacks both the wit and the presentation of The Simpsons, and the gameplay depth and variety of GTA; it is a mediocre Simpsons product as well as a mediocre GTA clone.

I think the later Simpsons experiment, The Simpsons Game, is better both as a game and as an incarnation of the series' spirit.

The Good
Every landmark, character, situation and object you can think of that has graced the Simpsons TV show gets to make an appearance here. As advertised, the game places you in a virtual Springfield (divided in 4 zones) and you are free to visit such places as Camp Krusty, Moe's Tavern, Mr. Burns mansion, etc. as well as meet all of the characters from the show in one way or another, even the obscure ones you don't see anymore like Dr. Nick (Hi Nick!!) and yeah, all of them are voiced by the show's full cast. On top of that, events from the show that can't be replayed in the game appear in collectible trading cards, and you can also collect different costumes for each of the Simpsons to wear (ie: play as Bartman instead of regular Bart). Heck! There's even an Itchy and Scratchy episode to be found if you clear the game at 100%!

In short if solely for the "has everything you've ever seen in the show" factor, Hit & Run is a Simpsons fan's wet dream... unfortunately that's all it's got going for it... I guess I should give credit to the designers for adding a way to automatically spawn the cars you own in your location (by using the payphones around the game) saving you the hassle of actually having to replace them or getting them back at your garage but it's really the only improvement over the GTA3 formula I could find.

The Bad
You would think that it takes a really determined effort to make the Simpsons suck and that nothing could probably accomplish such a feat, right? Well don't underestimate the resolve of the guys at Fox Interactive, who didn't believe they had done enough damage with Road Rage (a Simpsons-themed Crazy Taxi rip-off) and now deliver us a Simpsons-themed GTA3 rip-off. I'm still wondering why nobody has sued Fox's ass off over this but anyway, onto the game itself:

Hit & Run makes no effort to conceal that it's a GTA3 clone, basically you just drive around the gameworld doing "missions" for assorted NPCs that somehow tie up to a stupid plot tied up with the release of the brand new Krusty-Kola and some gigantic cybernetic bees that are supposed to be "spy cams" (because really, nobody notices giant cybernetic bees and they make perfect spies). As each of the Simpsons, you go up to a certain NPC (marked in your map) looking for clues to the mystery at hand, and they retort: "Sure I'll help you! But you have to get me to X place in 3 seconds!" or "No I won't help you unless you beat me in a race around the city" or similarly retarded stuff.

This shows us the game's basic problem: which is that since the gameplay is completely forced upon the license (because "Hey! GTA3 sells! And the Simpsons sells! So if you put them both together...") the end result is a collection of meaningless and idiotic sequences in which the player has no hope of ever getting involved into. Plus, since it's a family title, you can't really have the violence and extra gameplay features you had in GTA3, so the game is only left with races, races and lots of races. Everything in Springfield is settled with a race apparently and if you think no amount of innane races with impossibly difficult time limits and cars that explode at the smallest touch can bore you then I suggest you give this title a try. Similarly the plot in GTA3 was more or less linked with the missions and the gansta theme of the game, Hit & Run on the other hand has nothing Simpson about it's plot or gameplay premise.

But wait! It doesn't stop there! The game is also a Mario-clone! As you often need to jump around destroying the robotic bees and collecting giant floating gold coins so that you can buy all the costumes and cars in the game (which are often required for doing certain missions). Believe me, nothing seems so out of place in a Simpsons game as jumping around from building to building collecting giant gold coins. And that's without mentioning the hidden trading cards, special jumps, cars and assorted collectible crap a-la Pokemon.

Finally the graphics left me cold. For as much flak as it has taken, cel (or toon or flat or whatever you call it)-shading has its uses in videogames as shown in the new Ninja Turtles games, and I can't help but think that Hit & Run would have looked much better with it. As it is now, the game is your average unimpressive 3D title, made all the worse by the cartoony flat-colored Simpsons world which really cries for cel-shading.

The Bottom Line
Plagiarism at it's worst, as it trashes both a kickass license and a kickass gameplay concept in the same game. Think of all the bad parts of GTA3 magnified tenfold and brutally shoved in a gameworld that has nothing to do with it, sprinkled with some low-grade platformer crap and you'll get a sense of the mess that Hit & Run is.

The only use for this game would be as masturbatory material for Simpsons cultists or as a nice way to get your kid off your back if you have a retarded and easily-fooled kid that's bugging you to get him GTA but you are afraid that he'll grow up to be a hooker-shooting gangsta.