Simpsons Hit A Home(r) Run With GTA Clone?

Thanks to GameSpot for their review of the PS2/Xbox/GC driving game, The Simpsons: Hit & Run, released this week, in which they shrewdly point out: "with perhaps the sole exception of Konami's 1991 arcade action game, The Simpsons, no [Simpsons games] have really even proved to be much in the way of fun." Although it seems "practically every mission in the game is a direct clone of one of the GTA driving missions", the reviewer thinks Hit And Run "finally manages to bring the world of the Simpsons to life with proper justice", and much of the appeal, according to Gamers.com, is in the references: "You'll plow through a field of Tomacco... and take a shortcut through the Stonecutters' Hidden Tunnel... you'll conduct missions that require you to collect 'flatmeat' for Cletus, [and] round up monkeys for Dr. Nick's experiments."

Comments

Re:I don't understand these people

[Kyouryuu]

With the track record most Simpsons games ahve, 8.3 is legendary. The only really good Simpsons game, IMHO, was that "generic" beat-em-up Konami produced for the arcades. Sure, they probably cloned the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles engine and replaced the sprites, but it was a fun game, which is far more than I can say about any of Acclaim's butcherings of the franchise.

I have a gut feeling that the people who are in charge of Simpsons licensing as it applies to video games are out of touch with how well the games do in the market. When the producers of TMNT wanted a new video game to commemorate their resurrection of the series, they faithfully returned to Konami and commissioned them to do it. Why the producers of the Simpsons games continually allowed Acclaim to tarnish their reputation, instead of going back to the only publisher that actually made a good game, is mysterious to me.