|
Preview  Simpsons Road Rage
- By Nathaniel Walker
Do you remember the Iguana’s N64 game South Park? Of course you do. It offered a hilarious li’l romp through the world of South Park, with brilliantly implemented voice samples and supra-grossness to boot! It had bright colors, great weapons, and smooth control (thanks to the fact that Iguana “borrowed” the first-person engine from their Turok developers for the game). Every beloved character from the TV show had a place, distributed hither and thither, which made rounding every corner a little exciting. But alas! There was one tremendous problem. After you rounded most of those corners, and squeezed out most of the voice samples, and tossed around a Christmas Poo or two, the game quickly got dull. For while it was far from thoroughly awful, South Park on the N64 suffered from one basic problem: the designers spent too much time figuring out how to squeeze their lucrative license into a cartridge, and not nearly enough time working out how to make it a good game. Simple as that.
Prepare yourself for Round 2, Simpsons-style. The Simpsons Road Rage, Electronic Arts GameCube-bound racing game coming out this month, seems to be headed in the same direction. A parade of cherished characters, an explosion of relatively amusing sound bites, the occasional reference to sex and/or alcohol—just like South Park, it sounds like a great game in the making. Unfortunately, from what I have seen, the similarities between the two license-dependent games do not stop there: this new title looks as though it will suffer terribly in the forgotten arena of gameplay. It might not take creativity to slap a license on a lunchbox, but videogames are obviously different. Videogame design is, more or less, an art form. If it is bland, unoriginal, and lacks depth, it will not carry the day. I mean, geez—even the basic mechanics of the game seem unbearably derivative. Similar to the way that the South Park developers took their cue from Turok on the N64, Electronic Arts is taking their cue hard-core from Sega’s Crazy Taxi.
Apparently Mr. Burns has taken control of Springfield’s transit system, hoping to make bundles of ciz-ash while simultaneously spreading cancer around with his nuclear-powered buses (the whole transportation-monopoly thing seemed sufficiently boring to me, even without the pointless addition of horrible illness and death and stuff). The citizens of Springfield stage a bus boycott (another ill-conceived plot development with unnecessarily petty reminders of culturally sensitive stuff), and your job is to drive around town, Crazy Taxi-style, and pick folks up/drop folks off. There are over 25 characters stuffed in the game…and I have to admit I expect some comedy here and there simply because those guys—they are funny guys! The dialogue will be custom-delivered depending upon which characters are in the car or hitting the pavement. Admittedly, the way the game handles dialogue does sound delightful.
All in all, there are 5 Springfieldian realms to explore, and apparently there are over 100 Springfield landmarks to enjoy driving next to/around/through/over. Wow! 25 characters from The Simpsons, over a hundred landmarks from The Simpsons, and probably some hilarious utterances from The Simpsons! All of these things from The Simpsons are clearly and presently the game’s strongest attractions, and I must admit the stuff is almost enough to warrant checking the game out. But it still seems terribly sad to me—because my first impression is that all of the game’s strong points are from the television show and have very little to do with the game itself.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the game will rock the Kasbah. Honestly, I haven’t played it yet, so I should probably not be so quick to raise the red flags. But all of my skepticism has been backed up by these little things here and there, for example: why did EA fail to take advantage of the GameCube’s revolutionary toon-shading capabilities? The screen shots I have come across all look very dim and un-cartoonish. And why, pray tell, is the gameplay so poorly thought out that it is at best a “tribute” to the brilliantly original Crazy Taxi? On EA’s internet profile for the game on their website, it doesn’t even mention the GameCube concerning the future of the title. XBox is the only name up there. Bad. Finally, the story is lame. For a videogame based on a show that is usually positively brilliant in the story department, settling for a mediocre story was—pure and simple—a vivid dedication to poor taste. If the all of these things both great and small were not taken care of properly, what reason do we have to presume the title's difficult-to-identify good traits will somehow outdo those glaring nasties? We might all be better off with a Bartman lunchbox, after all.
- 11.4.2001 |
 |
|
INFO |
|
Release Date:
12.04.2001
|
|
|
