It may have been released a good few months ago now, but if you've been paying attention, I'm not particularly concentrating on new releases. I have a good reason for this, not that I'm worried about being overshadowed by professional and more successful reviewers - if I was, I wouldn't have bothered in the first place. But no, my reason is quite simple. "Meh".
Anyway, The Simpsons Game initially struck fear into my very soul because of how badly I thought the Movie went, and the last half decent Simpsons game was Hit 'n' Run (or rather, Grand Theft Simpson), which was about as long as the average person takes to get annoyed at a bus stop in the rain. With someone using the loudspeaker on their mobile.
Although Hit 'n'... screw it, I refuse to use that abbreviation anymore. Although GTA Simpson was generally actually pretty fun to play, it was stupidly short, a little confusing and desperately trying to be a racing game in disguise. Not a decent racing game, but a budget bodge-job. Think Mario Kart, only without Mario or any weapons. Yeah, everyone knows how fun the time trial mode was.
After seeing a clip of the movie on a big TV in Selfridges, something possessed me to buy the DVD and somehow it was a lot better than I remembered, so I decided to give the game a chance. At this point you would assume the game would be a tie-in with the movie at some level, but no. It's basically an episode (albeit long episode) where the Simpsons world turns out to be a video game.
My first word of advice with this one is do not, under any circumstances, play the demo available on Xbox Live, or your inferior console's equivalent. All you'll do is waste time and get angry. For some reason, EA decided that the best level to demo was one more or less half way through the game. And it's easy enough, if you've had half a game of practice, not so much when you're dropped into a situation wherein Lard Lad is running around trying to kill you for no apparent reason.
The best way to describe the game itself is that it's like playing a cartoon, only entirely in co-op mode. Great if you have a friend (ok, I wont make that comment, too easy), but kind of annoying playing solo because there's no form of "sit" command, allowing the computer to occassionally guess where you want it to stay. And it's usually wrong. There are no stupid detailed textures that you wouldn't find on TV, the sky is bright and blue and the cutscenes are actual recreations of the TV animation. Nice. Another cool and quirky thing is that should you do embarass yourself by being a bit of a spanner, your teamate will probably laugh at you.
OK, so that doesn't sound very good, but I challenge you not to react when you, as Bart, miss a ledge by mere inches, sending you plumetting towards a spikey failure, and in the background you hear Homer giggling at you for being thick.
I guess the only bad things I can think of is that while the camera angle makes the best of the cell shaded graphics so that the characters actually look like the real deal, it is in fact allergic to walls. Your best bet is to avoid walls where possible and cry when you can't. Another let down is that some cutscenes use the game engine to save a bit of time - I guess - but realistically, the pay off isn't good enough to constitute highlighting blocky, rigid mockeries of characters.
Oh yeah, there's also the drawback of the price. It came out in about November and it's just been hovering around the preowned £30 mark. Pretty damn pricey when you consider that Halo 3 came out only a month of two earlier and it's about £10 cheaper.
And if for no other reason, try this game for the world's easiest achievement, even easier than on PGR3. Trust me, try it!
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