Pros: Road Rage mode, tons of Simpsons characters and authentic VAs
Cons: Mission mode, blocky characters, cel shading strikes again
The bottom line: what computers?
The Simpsons franchise hasn't seen a game worthy of the show since Bart's Nightmare on SNES, which was about eight years ago. In that time, however, at least five games based on the show have sullied store shelves, one of which being the abominable Simpsons Wrestling for PSX. But The Simpsons Road Rage is ready to change that, at least to some extent. Given that titles based on the show have never been system sellers or five-star titles, the quality of Road Rage is actually acceptable and not in any way under-par if you think about the lineage of it's predecessors. Still, I was expecting a lot more than the final package had to offer.

Road Rage is seperated into four modes - Head to Head, Road Rage, Sunday Driving, and a Mission mode. Head to Head is a basic two player mode, Road Rage is where the game mimmicks Crazy Taxi, Sunday Driving allows you to explore Springfield and get to know the town before engaging in some of the missions based in it, and the Mission mode is self-explanatory.

My favorite of the modes would have to be Road Rage, which is essentially Crazy Taxi dressed up with Simpsons characters and the requisite voice actors. If you've ever played Sega's classic, you know what to expect - fast gameplay, an unforgiving timer, a large city to explore and traffic to deal with while speeding to wherever your passenger wants to go. It's not very original, but the Simpsons theme spices the cloned gameplay up a bit, almost to the point that it feels like an entirely new experience. Almost.

However, Road Rage is only the 'good side of the coin'. There is almost always a bad, and in this case that would be the campaign, where you take any character and guide them through a series of ten missions that somehow tie in with Burns' evil nuclear-powered buses. It seems Burns is trying to unleash them on the public and enhance public transportation, unknowing that Homer and his friends will try to stop him by engaging in random activities that they somehow hope will end Burns' tirade.

Really, the plot is rather pathetic; almost intentionally so, but that's not a problem (unlike most people, plots only go so far with me, it's the gameplay that's most important). Unfortunately, the mission gameplay is about on the same level as the plot. Each level requires you to either knock over a certain amount of objects/people, or take a character somewhere. The former is of the most frequency, and as you can probably guess, gets very reptitive, even though no mission lasts over 1 minute. The difficulty spikes up randomly, and it doesn't help that the locations of things that need to be 'knocked over' or 'destroyed' aren't shown on the mini-map. You'll most likely play through this mode once, and never again.

I didn't bother much with the Sunday Driving mode, apart from a quick run around springfield. The mode, as I mentioned, is there to help players get to know the area they're racing in, so they can improve performance by not always having to rely on the directional arrows. It's more or less a training mode, but not by name and it's much less tedious.

One thing that impressed me was the number of characters to you can unlock. Among the more notable ones are Chief Wiggun, Prof. Fink, Snake, Apu, "Mr. Plow" Homer, Flanders and Reverend Lovejoy. Of course, you also get to play as any of the six (including Abe) Simpsons family members. Sad to report, but there is no Comic Store Guy in the game, at least not in playable form. Although a close apprentice (?) of his, Willy, who he frequents is playable (apparently). There's about 20 characters overall, which are mostly unlocked by scoring high points in Road Rage. Newer areas (six in total) and different cars (such as the Powell Motors car) can also be unlocked. S:RR has a decent amount of replay value, which would have been far better if the mission structure was perhaps a bit more ambitious.

There are a few minor gameplay problems, and I stress minor (they'll be entirely covered in this paragraph). One, the camera gets too jittery in some of the missions, and some cars have an annoying habit of tipping over to their side and winding up on two wheels. This gets annoying when you're trying to beat the clock and get a "Fast" rating, as opposed to "Slow". Also, there seems to be far too much slide in the brakes on most of the cars. Unless you're driving a vehicle that can pull a 180 degree halt, you'll be stuck having to backpedal between the yellow bars.
But that's not to say the game controls poorly - quite the contrary. Despite the speed involved, controlling your vehicle is simple and easy to learn, heck even easy to master.

This game doesn't necessarily 'look' like the show, despite that it carries through well with the theme/style otherwise. Graphically, it's a cel-shaded affair for the cars, blocky polygon models for the characters (both in CG and realtime) and simplistic environments with bland, albeit sharp textures. It has a somewhat cartoonish look, but at the same time bears a last-generation/half-assed look. Still, it's acceptable, and close-up the cars reveal one of the only positive aspects of cel-shading, the near-perfect semblance between it and real hand-animated 'toons.

About the only qualm I had was with the pop-up. It is most prominent in the Mission mode, where the objects you have to knock over/kill/otherwise suddenly pop up when you're close to them. It doesn't help matters that you have to practically be aiming the car straight at them to score a point, but that they aren't seen on the mini-map and can't even be seen from a good distance only drains more fun out of the missions.

The music ain't too great, mostly because you can hardly hear it. Unlike Simpsons Wrestling, where the music is loud and clear (its the only decent part of that game), the music here fades into the background in favor of the sound effects, which, while authentic and pretty funny, get repetitve all to quickly. There's so much voicework in here that you'd think they would better randomize the chain that voice overs follow. No such luck here, unfortunately. A C- aural feat.

As much as I love the Road Rage mode, that's only a fraction of the entire game. There're three other modes here, all of which failed to hold my interest. If the mission strucure was better, and there was to it (perhaps a better story, although that's not necessary for good progressive gameplay), I would easily give this title a higher score. I'd easily recommend it to Simpsons fans or as a rental to CT-fans, but that's as far this title's appeal can reach. Better luck next time Fox.