Having grown up in the middle of the 90s "Cultural War", I was used to seeing The Simpsons everywhere -- people just loved to mod their favorite characters into any game under the sun, going as far as to incorporate them to settings that had nothing to do with the characters themselves... and I distinctly remember chasing someone sporting a Homer Simpson skin around the Quake II multiplayer maps as a young lad. It was as ridiculous as it was fun, and actually a breath a fresh of air. But, of course, those were just fan efforts, passion projects made by people who had the tools and the technical know-how to force the "yellow fever" into anything they liked.
Actual Simpsons games were a different story... most were super bland, and weren't even worth it as rentals. The time I came home from the video store with a copy of "Virtual Bart" for the Genesis safely tucked under my arm marked the first occasion that I was actually bored while playing my beloved 16-Bit beast, and the game found its way back to the shelves in less than two hours, despite me trying desperately to connect with it, because it honestly looked hella cool. That set a trend that made me mark Simpsons-related games as "possible garbage" whenever I picked one up, and caused me to end up favoring other offerings when browsing store shelves. I had lost all hope after getting punk'd thrice by games starring America's favorite family, and I thought for sure that the games were never going to appeal to me. Why would they? "Virtual Bart" was an unplayable disaster. "Krusty's Funhouse" did very little to impress and remains my least-played Genesis game... and even with the safety net of emulation, "Bart vs The Space Mutants" just failed to entertain. It was official, put a stamp on this thing and ship it to hell: There were no good Simpsons games.
Gotta love Homer's midlife crisis being in full display here. He not only has a convertible, but a PINK convertible at that, too.
But then, years later, I stumbled upon an icon on the vastly overcrowded desktop of my favorite Internet Cafe, and my friend recommended me to click on it: It was "The Simpsons: Hit & Run", a game I hadn't heard about and wasn't particularly keen to try out. The back of my mind was already hard at work trying to come up with excuses to get my friend to forget about it, stating that we only had an hour to play and that I would much rather use it on the virtual battlefields of CS_Assault. However, my friend wasn't the kind to take "no" for an answer and kept insisting until I started the game just to shut him up.
I'll admit that I was in a bit of a warpath at that point, pretty much looking for excuses to come down on that one title hard, almost eagerly awaiting for it to fail in front of me... why? Because I was already used to Simpsons games sucking, and I wasn't ready to make an exception to that stone-set rule. What if the game looked amazing? It was the bare-minimum expectation for the times, not a bonus. What if it was smooth to control? I wasn't going to put that on the "W" column, either. And what if it was fun to play and actually made me eager to explore its virtual recreation of a world I had come to known just as well as my own? Whatever, there were weapons to buy, bombs to defuse and tactics to implement in other games. I just couldn't stay on Springfield.
I like how Apu and Snake are so used to each other that they aren't even fazed by their misadventures on both ends of a gun at this point. Business as usual on the Kwik-E-Mart.
That should have been the end of the story... after all, my PC at home couldn't run this thing even if I wanted to, and I had no PS2 to play it on, either. But then, I had an assignment due and I needed to complete it ASAP, giving the universe a big, juicy excuse to insert this thing back into my life with destructive force.
I was the kind of teenager my parents had always warned me about: Spiteful. Vengeful. Prideful. I did the bare-minimum to pass every class and I often ran afoul of every expectation set upon me. If a teacher called on me, I would give the most disrespectful answers ever, and pay the price for it, too. Those detentions and footnotes next to my semester reviews? I wore them like a badge of pride. However... I didn't hate the (now mandatory) computer classes, and the staff running them had always been kind to me, so I just couldn't disappoint them. A part of me refused to be infected with whatever rebel virus had gotten a hold of me during those troubled times and actually managed to fight its way back to the front. It was a brutal fight between my own confusion over what to do, the expectations set upon me and the --often blurry-- line between who I was vs who I actually wanted to be. And, for a day at least, it was a fight I won.
I really do wish that we saw more of Lisa's beach outfit in the show. That looks sick, man.
The assignment was simple: we had create a mock website with the tools and knowledge gained since the start of the year. Put some hyperlinks in there, format the HTML tags, add some custom code; create some buttons and make them react to the mouse as it hovered over them. We had to make the page interesting to read... none of that "Lorem Ipsum" BS allowed. And, more importantly, we had to have fun! To make something we actually wanted to show people.
I had neglected this assignment (despite actually wanting to do it) because I was too busy hanging out with the wrong crowd... if I could have a chat with my teenage self, I wouldn't even talk to the stupid jerk, I'd just smack him silly. I had actually woken up completely wasted the Sunday before this thing was due and I hadn't even started it! And for some reason that actually hurt my pride, so I decided to make something memorable with the tools available to me at the time: my memories and every ounce of writing prowess I could gather in such short notice. The results? I scrambled like crazy, "hamster-wheeling" ideas on my heavily hungover head, discarding things like unwanted junk mail until something stuck. When a cup of coffee cleared my head enough, I suddenly remember that I had been playing that one game over a friend's house the week prior. Would it work? I didn't have nearly enough experience with the game to actually write about it, but it was a gamble I was willing to make. And so, I went online and grabbed some screenshots, trying to recall the context of the images and the feel of playing them, all whilst doing the rest of my work in a fever-like state. When I was done, FrontPage Express looked like it was about to explode: I had created a Frankenstein Monster of stolen images, half-working code and text that was typed in a furiously inconsistent matter. The site worked, but I didn't expect it to pass. It was too bare-bones, too obviously rushed.
Credit where it's due: You can't fault the game for not adding variety, as you get to play as a lot of characters.
My teacher liked the originality of the concept, but spared no harsh words about the obvious way in which it seemed to have been thrown together last minute. Still, I passed that one and felt strangely pleased with myself. And if I had enjoyed the game enough to actually write something worth a passing grade after maybe ten minutes of gameplay, then maybe there truly was something in there. Next time I went to the Internet Cafe, I didn't even hesitate -- Counter-Strike, Warcraft III and Vice City be dammed. It was Homer's story now.
The first thing that truly resonated with me upon playing this one for reals for the first time was just how fun it was to drive around this rendition of Springfield, and how alive it felt through the sheer number of recognizable models walking around the streets. It was actually really entertaining seeing just how far I could take my mischief-making ways before the game had enough of my tomfoolery and decided to put an end to it (which is actually one of the main points I used to judge games since my Deus Ex days). Kicking the absolute tar outta my fellow Springfieldians was really cool because they didn't react realistically to it... they didn't fight back like in GTA, nor did they try to run away like in Deus Ex. They mostly just tumbled around like drunken acrobats while swift, unjustified punishment was delivered upon them. It was great... and the fact that this is about the only version in which the local Police Department are actually good at their job only added to the madness and the fun of it all. Seeing that meter fill up until shenanigans turned into actual assault was always a three-second fire drill of complete excitement, and I couldn't have enough of it.
Another thing I adored was the fact that my car exploded like in the aforementioned Vice City, but with the added hilarity of actually letting you drive the burnt out, charred remains of the destroyed vehicle. I get that this was made because there was too-high-a-chance of having the player character stranded somewhere far away from a phone (or without enough coins to actually swap transportation means), but I just loved the whole thing, and I could see that actually being part of the show, kinda like when Hank, Bill and Dale get stuck trying to get Boomhauer's destroyed, drowned vehicle going in King of the Hill. It's just maddeningly fun, and the perfect comeuppance to one's misdeeds.
The game kinda reminds me of "Body Harvest" for the N64 due to sheer amount of vehicles to use. Kinda impressive for a game already full of content!
However, I found this one to be really hard for some reason. I had no problem completing the first couple of missions, then everything after that became a test of patience in ways that I honestly hadn't expected. The colorful graphics, great voice samples and excellent map design did little to compensate for the tight time limits and frankly annoying missions the game put in front of me... but if it thought that I was going to just take that, it was deeply mistaken. Because, you see, one thing that I really, really like about "Hit & Run" is the fact that it is very forgiving when it comes to destroying your opponents in nearly every mission, so I would spend a good portion of those races and challenges ramming my vehicle into whoever I was pitted against until their vehicle took more damage than mine did and exploded, then it was just a piece of cake, cruising to the finish line as the poor AI had no choice but to crawl around the map with their incredibly slow wreck of a car, raising sparks everywhere but without any speed to back them up. Was it cheap? Of course it was! But that was part of the fun, and I give the game props for letting me do it when so many other titles would have stopped the challenge right there and then.
Like so many other games from my past, this one gained new significance after I decided to share it with my kids (which is my new make-or-break challenge). They really liked what they saw, but found the controllers a little too unresponsive for their liking and the game to be a bit too hard for them to enjoy, so I downloaded someone else's save file and just let them explore the map like that. Once they had free range to just roam around the area and see it all, they really started digging it in new ways. Still, this one is rarely played in my household due to the sheer volume of better offerings available. I was a bit surprised by that (given that they LOVE The Simpsons in the same way I did when I was their age), but I guess I can't blame them. This game is at least a decade older than them, and it hasn't aged all that well. But as a time-killer? Yeah, we still get some honest fun out of it while driving around all the available vehicles and kicking people when they are --literally-- down. Springfield is already represented in the Nobel Prize category, so it doesn't need us trying for the coveted Peace Award.
I always ignore the first mission when starting a new game just to annoying anyone on my path. Poor Marge has been standing there for ages just waiting for me to take this seriously.
I know that there were lots of other things I could have touched upon, but a full review wasn't the intent here. I wanted to share my personal experience with this one through the very specific set of circumstances that led me to dismiss it outright, to actually give it a fair shot, to become sort of addicted to it through the sheer power of "Oh, DAMN!" that every High School student is familiar with after narrowly missing the executioner's axe through the explosive majesty of a last-minute effort that was juuuuust enough to pass.
Needless to say, I had a lot of fun with this one... and I still play it from time to time just to recapture some of those Internet Cafe feels that seem so distant now.
What about you? What were your memories with this one? Tell us!
Last edited:
