The Simpsons have been a series that have brought immeasurable joy to TV viewers all over the world. The nonsensical situations that Bart, Lisa, Homer, Marge and Maggie find themselves every week (or if you live in a city like mine, 7 days a week) have entertained fans for the good part of a decade. It seems that while this success has made The Simpsons into a household name, it hasn’t translated well into video games before. I’m sure that titles such as Bart vs. The Space Mutants or Simpsons Road Rage pop up when you think of past failures, but now the curse has been broken; there’s finally a good Simpsons game for everyone to play. Simpsons: Hit & Run is the brainchild of Radical Entertainment, and although the concept of the game is clearly borrowed from a certain series, that doesn’t make this game any less enjoyable.

Hit & Run is broken up into five different stages, where you are able to control Homer, Bart, Lisa, Marge and Apu. Within each stage there are several missions that you must complete in order to advance to the next stage. These missions are pretty standard to each stage, with only slight variances along the way. Collect the Item! Ram the car! Race your opponent! That sums up every main mission that you need to complete in Hit & Run, and though there are other extra missions that you can complete in order to receive extra rewards, all of them are also the same. It’s a total shame that the game is structured like this because they could’ve been a lot more creative with the missions. While the extreme violence of GTA was obviously a big selling point (not to mention very controversial), the missions were always different from each other, and even the way that you can access them was different. In Hit & Run, the missions are never different, and it just seems that you’re connecting the dots just to complete the stage. Even travelling on foot isn't as fun as it is in the GTA series. You have a double jump, a kick attack… and that’s about it. None of the missions in the game require you to be on foot, so unless you have to jump out of a burning car, or you want to collect coins in order to purchase new costumes and vehicles, there’s really no reason to be walking around Springfield. Sadly, Hit & Run reeks of Diet GTA, and it doesn’t attempt to hide it.

What’s also annoying is the extremely small collection of vehicles you can drive in the game. Sure, there are some great vehicles, such as the Mr. Plow truck, Bart’s Honor Roller cart and the Duff Beer truck, but a lot could have bee done to personalize the game for each character. It doesn’t make sense for characters like Bart and Lisa to drive cars; they could’ve been cruising around the city on a skateboard or bicycle for instance. It would’ve gone a long way in making the game a lot more involved if every character didn’t control the exact same way, not to mention that the missions themselves could have been very different.

Repetitive missions aside, what Hit & Run does best is that it captures the feeling and atmosphere of Springfield in a video game. The world of Springfield is massive, and it just oozes personality. It really does feel like you’re in the cartoon. Radical Entertainment went to great lengths to make sure that the entire game felt like one long episode from the series, right down to the front end of the game. Although they aren’t cel-shaded, all of the characters in the game true to the series, and even have the same little details that they have in the show. The extra costumes are also a hoot, especially the “Florida” costume for Lisa. Again, this goes a long way into making the game really charming and a hoot to play, despite the flaws in the game’s design. I do have to give credit to Radical Entertainment for designing a Springfield that’s full of secret paths and areas, but actually looks like a city, instead of fog-covered wasteland. There’s no discernable popup in the game, and it very rarely slows down, unless there’s a lot of things happening on the screen at once.

Where Hit & Run really shines is the sound. All of the actors from the show represent their characters perfectly here; the fact that Matt Groening and the staff of writers for the show were able to oversee the project only made the game better, especially when it came to the script. The dialogue found in the game is so dead on that it’s almost eerie. Hearing Dr. Nick yell “Hi everybody!” or Cletus talk in his traditional slack-jawed yokel dialect makes the game truly come alive, even though the rest of the game isn’t up to snuff. The impact that all of the voice actors had in the game wouldn’t have been as big if the script was written by someone who wasn’t associated with the show itself. Even the soundtracks that you hear in the game (which are wild variations on the classic Simpsons theme song) are fun to listen to. Quite often you’ll hear the music play, and then it’ll drop for a couple of seconds during moments of inactivity on your part, only to pick up again once the action starts.

Clearly, Simpsons: Hit & Run is an exception to the rule. A game that’s this unoriginal and average when it comes to the actual gameplay shouldn’t be this fun to experience, but it is. You’ll find yourself wanting to progress into the game just to see how the story unfolds, and not because you’re actually having fun driving around to collect 20 monkeys scattered across Springfield. What Hit & Run lacks in design, it more than makes up for in presentation and story telling. The voice actors are at their full potential in this game, and the writing is hilarious. Fans of the show will definitely want to check this game out, and for those who wouldn’t mind running over Marge with your family Sedan car, you ought to pick it up too!

· · · Reno