The Simpsons Wrestling

The Good
Okay first of all, the characters chosen as wrestlers are hilarious (Bumblebee Man, Professor Frink, Apu to name a few), and the voice acting to represent them is top notch. The characters taunt one another before, after and during battle... and occasionally it can be scripted between two specific characters so what they say isn't generic and actually pertains to one another. There's some familiar one-liners... there's some brand new voice quips and some of it is just as memorable. Also, random voice quips come from the "crowd" in various locations... letting Reverend Lovejoy say something during a match... or Kent Brockman... who announces during the fights.

The Bad
As a game however, Simpsons wrestling suffers badly in both Gameplay and Graphics.... although it may be fun to play as the Simpsons, the town of Springfield never looked so bad. The fighters in the ring are in disfigured polygon 3D... and outside the ring, the background art is made up of sloppy drawing and 2D paper-thin characters.

You'll get no help trying to control your Simpsons characters either. It's hard for each character to pull off their moves and several of the moves are cheap in nature. Things like exploding bottles of alcohol and Barney's burping attack.... Bart throws a skateboard and Apu runs across the screen punching wildly... they're certainly fun in nature, but simply aren't good movies in a gameplay sense. In addition, it's difficult to knock your opponent down, heck.. it's difficult to attack in the proper direction towards your opponent.... and should you knock them down, there's no guarantee you'll use the controls to navigate well enough to go pin them.

The Bottom Line
The game seems rushed.... as if there could have been better 3D and smoother textures/backgrounds made in here, but weren't. I can only assume the beta testers were amazed by the top notch voice acting and laughing so much at new Simpsons lines that they didn't realize the game played like a dog. I recommend taking the same view.

On the other hand, this probably ranks as one of the better Simpsons games :P