The Simpsons Road Rage

Back when we first saw this game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in May and later at some EA Gamers' Day in the summer, some of the developers and producers for The Simpsons Road Rage tried with all of their might to convince us that this game is not at all like Sega's Crazy Taxi. And they attempted to do this while showing off a game that had the basic goal of picking up people and dropping them off at their desired destination in order to earn lots of money before the time runs out.

Sounds exactly like Crazy Taxi, right? Sure does to me. The Simpsons Road Rage definitely has plenty of features and traits that differentiates itself from Sega's game, but there's no denying that this Radical Entertainment developed and Electronic Arts published game is at least inspired by Sega's hit arcade game. And there's nothing at all wrong with that, especially when you consider that Crazy Taxi is a good game that's definitely worth copying and The Simpsons is one of the best licenses around. It would seem to be a surefire formula for success.

Gameplay
The basic gameplay in the game's main mode of play, which is called Road Rage Mode, is essentially identical to that of Crazy Taxi with a few exceptions. The first of which is probably the fact that there's some background story to what's going on in the game.

You see, Mr. C. Montgomery Burns has bought out the Springfield Transit Corporation, converted all the buses to nuclear power and is charging an arm and a leg to anyone who wishes to use it. As opposition to this move by Mr. Burns, the fine people of Springfield have decided to offer shuttle service (as opposed to taxi service) to the stranded citizens of their lovely town with the goal of earning enough dough (about $1 million) to buy back the transit corporation from the evil Mr. Burns.

The game itself is setup similarly to that of Crazy Taxi. After you select a character from the world of The Simpsons, of which there are 17 in total including Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Grandpa plus a slew of others that can be unlocked, you're put into a vehicle specific to your character and are thrust into an area of Springfield where you must pick up passengers and take them to their desired destination before the time limit runs out.

Money is earned while you have a passenger in your car and bonus amounts are rewarded for getting them to their destination on time with the total gratuity that you earn based on how quickly you get them to their destination in relation to the amount of time that was allotted for the trip. And with some fares, you'll be offered the chance to get a Road Rage Trip or Safe Trip bonus by either making it to the destination while either destroying a specified amount of objects or by making it to the destination without hitting more than two other vehicles.

The basic goal is to earn as much money as possible before the time limit runs out, which is initially determined by the difficulty level that you have the game set for and can be increased by picking up passengers, dropping them off at their destination in a timely matter, and by busting up the Springfield Transit Corporation bus stops.

One of the cool things about the game is that when you reach specified monetary milestones in the game you are given the opportunity to unlock more characters and more starting points, which are pretty much completely different areas of Springfield that are each fairly large in scale.

The characters all provide diverse gameplay experiences as their different cars control uniquely and have varied attributes with regard to speed and stability. The problem with all of it is that the levels aren't designed all that well and the basic gameplay doesn't really include anything beyond just picking up passengers and trying to get them to their destination before the timer runs out.

Other than the ability to pull off donuts, there aren't really any advanced gameplay mechanics that you can use. Whereas Crazy Taxi offered a lot of advanced techniques, such as the Crazy Dash, Crazy Dash, Crazy Breaks and Limit Cut, to help increase the play value of the game by giving advanced users more room for improvement in the game, The Simpsons Road Rage offers nothing of the sort.

Because of this, most gamers will grow weary of the gameplay in Road Rage even quicker than they ever would with Crazy Taxi even though it brings more characters, more locales and more things to unlock to the table. The gameplay just isn't all that deep and subsequently isn't nearly as rewarding as it ought to be.

And this is still true when you take into account the other modes in the game, which include Sunday Drive, Mission Mode, and Head to Head. Sunday Drive just lets you pick any available character and take drive them around any of the unlocked locales, which is pretty boring, but does give you the chance to learn the ins and outs of the different areas if that's what you're hoping to do.

The Mission Mode is equally uneventful as the missions offered are nothing more than either making it from point A to point B before Mr. Burns gets you or smash up "X" amount of things before the timer runs out. The missions take on average of 40-50 seconds to complete and the average load time to start a mission is approximately 30-35 seconds, so you're actually watching the game load almost as much as you're playing it.

What's even worse is the fact that if you realize that there's no way that you'll be able to complete the mission goal before the time runs out, whether because you just messed up, got lost, or got stuck in some wall, the game has to completely load the level again when you restart a mission. So, if you have to do a lot of that, you'll actually spend more time watching the game load than playing it. Definitely not a thing anyone would enjoy doing.

The only reason to play through the Mission Mode is that it'll unlock a special car that you couldn't get otherwise. Other than that, there's nothing rewarding about completing all 10 of the available missions.

The Head-to-Head mode would be a possible saving grace here, but it's hurt a bit by the fact that there aren't any advanced control mechanics. The gameplay is essentially like a game of "capture the flag" where you must race to get to the passenger first and then take him to the destination before the opponent steals him from you and then drops him off at the destination.

However, since there aren't really any advanced moves that you can do to go faster, if you mess up and find yourself way behind your opponent, there's not really a good way to catch up unless you just know some great shortcut that he doesn't know about and that's not really all that likely. It still provides for some quick fun, but, yet again, it's hampered quite a bit by the lack of depth in play mechanics.

Graphics
Making use of what's being touted as Toon Renderer technology, the developers have done a respectable job of bringing the 2D animated characters and world of The Simpsons into the third dimension. Most of the 3D models of the different characters look pretty much like they do in 2D, but with obvious changes that will arise from the move from 2D to 3D.

The world also looks like a cartoon and longtime fans of the animated show will notice tons of landmarks, both well known and obscure, that are ripped straight from the show. The environments are also extremely lively, as there are a lot of things that can be knocked around and broken up and a multitude of cars traffic the streets.

The main problem with the game's visuals is that while it does have a nice cartoon look, it's still not nice enough. This game simply does not look like one that should be running on a system as powerful as the PlayStation 2. The textures are all very low-res, there's a ton of clipping problems, and the framerate chugs way too much when there's a lot of action taking place onscreen. Even if all of the clipping and pop-up was completely cleaned up and all of the rough edges were smoothed out, this still wouldn't be a good-looking game.

Sound
The high point of this game is undoubtedly its sound and even more specifically, its excellence use of the licensed character voices from the animated television series. All of the characters in the game have their real voices from the show and most of them have a nice variety of one-liners that they'll say throughout the game, with many of them being classic lines from the show.

In addition to the standard lines that characters will say when they pick someone up or get picked up, some will have specific sets of lines based on the two characters in question -- for instance, when Homer picks up Bart, they'll say something that's specific to this particular situation instead of just the standard stuff they'll normally say when being picked up or getting into the car of another character.

After some play time, the voice do get repetitive as you'll have to spend quite some time with the game in order to open everything up, but a few of the one-liners just never seem to get old or annoying. Especially ones like Ralph's "the leprechaun tells me to burn things."

Outside of the voice samples, the general sound in the game is fairly standard fare as far as arcade-styled videogames are concerned. The music features a lot of tunes that seem straight from the TV show, as well, including some tracks that are at least inspired by the show.