This round, the chosen theme was ‘TV Tie-in’. Each game suggested had to be using a license from a movie or tv show. Somehow, we ended up with two driving-focused Simpsons games.
My aunt was in a car accident that altered the course of history. I was promised an allowance to purchase my first car. I had spent time after school looking at used car lots and craigslist ads. I took my driving test, passed with flying colors, received my license, and my aunt got into a car accident. Shortly before I got my driver’s license, my aunt totaled her all beige 2001 Buick Century. It wasn’t ‘TOTALED’ totaled. Just totaled enough for the insurance company. This insurance payout resulted in my aunt offering to give the car to my parents for me to use. Yes, charmed life. Yes, very blessed. Yes, so many people would have been elated in my shoes. But I didn’t want my grandfather’s car that had been passed down to my aunt, that had been totaled, and then passed on to me, because I wanted the promise of picking out my own car. My parents take the car, pay for the repairs, and give it to me. I think not really wanting this specific car made me care about it a lot less than I should have. Just a couple weeks after the car got repaired, I drove it to school one morning and accidentally hit somebody’s parked car with the Buick’s front bumper. Luckily it didn’t do any damage to their vehicle, but the corner of my bumper had basically shattered — a blemish that the Buick would endure for the rest of its time with me. It’s October 2024 as I am writing this, I just traded in a car and purchased a Jeep Cherokee that I am super excited about, but its got me thinking - the Buick really wasn’t that bad. It served me (pretty) well. I have some great memories with it (Blasting music on the freeway, driving around my college campus), some bad memories (heat not working in the winter, spinning out on the freeway, brake line snapping at a red light), and some more great memories (driving around Saginaw with my now wife, getting pulled over for the first time and the cop letting me go). And you know what? On top of all that, the seats were pretty comfy.
The Simpsons: Hit & Run is an ‘action-adventure’ game developed by Radical Entertainment for the Gamecube, Xbox, Playstation 2, and PC. The meat of the game consists of a handful of different mission types that have you running and driving around as a character from the tv show completing miscellaneous objectives. There are different cars to collect for different characters, collectibles scattered throughout the game world, and outfits to purchase for your characters.
The story of this game begins when Homer (Simpson) notices some black vans appearing around town and starts thinking the van parked outside his house is spying on him. Homer investigates and from there, the story spirals off into typical Simpsons craziness.
I’ll be honest: I do not care for The Simpsons in the slightest. It has never been my kind of comedy and I find the voice acting to be kind of annoying. This ended up being a huge problem for me while playing this game, because the game REALLY hits you over the head with all things ‘Simpsons’ (as it should). I had a good time playing the game for the first couple of missions, because these types of games are pretty rare now. If you went to a GameStop to purchase a new video game for your PlayStation 5, you might be hard pressed to find a game with arcade-like driving, simple combat, jam-packed with collectibles, and based on a license. After the first few missions, the realization of how repetitive the game is sets in. The mission structure is remarkably similar between levels making the actual objectives in the game feel like chores. The only saving grace here is completing all of a character’s missions and moving to a new area with a new character.
Overall, I wasn’t the biggest fan of this game. Also, a couple GameClub members take issue with the fact that this game has frequently been pitched to them as ‘Simpsons GTA’. Unfortunately, Hit & Run is a cheap caricature of a GTA game. You can see what they were trying to accomplish and they definitely got some parts right, but failed supremely in others. I would really only recommend this game to a Simpsons superfan and certainly not anybody who is looking for a GTA experience.
It has been about two weeks of me slowly picking away at this review and here at the finish line, I am thinking more and more about my old Buick. The issues I had with the car only came with time - a daily driver is bound to show its age after 12 or so years, right? Well with my new jeep, I am quickly seeing issues that I have never seen in other cars like something called ‘hood flutter’. It’s making me think about how even though I didn’t exactly ‘want’ the Buick when it was given to me, it really was a great car. It definitely deserved better care than I gave it and that is probably why I had major issues down the line, but it certainly never had ‘hood flutter’.. Anyways, I am experiencing yet another dose of ‘be thankful for what you’ve got’.
"A caricature of GTA"
"Take off those rose-tinted glasses"
"Eat my dust, dusteaters"
