This game play might not be anything special, but it delivers more than enough laughs to make it worth a look.

The Simpsons Game nails the show’s trademark humor, in-jokes, and social satire, plus it features impressive cartoony graphics and the real-deal voice actors. This is total fan service, meaning Simpsons fans — and apologists — will be pleased. The standard-issue platforming and beat-em-up gameplay — in co-op or player-swapping form — though, is nothing special. Fortunately, an abundant collection of game parodies pepper the missions and give the game added personality that elevates it over its gameplay misgivings.

The action follows the Simpsons family as they discover they are part of a videogame: Bart stumbles upon the manual of a game set in Springfield and realizes he and the whole Simpson family have special powers. It makes for a very meta experience, happily breaking that fourth wall repeatedly and filled with clever self-references, that honestly makes for a better premise than just shoehorning the characters into some popular-genre knockoff (be it The Simpsons: Hit & Run or The Simpsons Wrestling, among many, many others).

The Simpsons Game from Electronic Arts hasn’t been shy about poking fun at fellow game conventions, and a while ago we reported that Rockstar had its feathers ruffled by the parody. Lead designer Greg Rizzer commented that “if we make fun of Grand Theft Auto, we’re not going to hurt the sales of Grand Theft Auto… But yeah, we’ve definitely had some reactions — we’ve had to pull stuff from the game.”

That’s a spot-on description, as we found this weekend that the trailer previously devoted to the “Grand Theft Scratchy” parody has now been retitled to the infinitely less clever “Mob Rules,” confirming that Grand Theft Auto was one of the casualties caused by lack of a sense of humor. Otherwise, the trailer looks untouched, so it seems that the title was the major problem and not the parody game content itself.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 7:40 am and is filed under PS3, All. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.