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EA Announces Simpsons Game, Parodies Videogames
Eurogamer has the news that The Simpsons will be coming to a new videogame title sometime in the near future, a new game with an interesting twist. Instead of playing as the Simpsons inside a more typical genre, such as the arcade smash-em-up from the early nineties or The Simpsons Road Rage, EA's newly-announced title will lampoon other videogames using typical Simpsons comedy. All of the cast members will be lending their voices to the title, and hints about the type of games we can expect were already available when the press release went out. A mock poster with the words Medal of Homer flying above a war-torn battlefield suggests what we might see in the game. "Described as a 16-level 'action comedy' with a storyline penned by the long-running TV show's long-running writers, the new Simpsons game is due out on PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PS2, DS and PSP this autumn. It's being put together by EA Redwood Shores, and is full of touches that EA reckons fans of the series - now 400 episodes old - will find exciting, like individual title animations and stories for each of the 16 levels, which are being treated like episodes." You can see the posters from the EA event over at Kotaku.
Um, not really. Microsoft's XNA development framework is specifically designed to make Windows/Xbox360 co-development easy, and if you're working on PS3 you're going to be using C++ and OpenGL, which is also well supported on PC. You don't have to optimise for every configuration out there, at most you'll have ATI- and nvidia-specific graphics code.
This decision is either about sales (and possibly piracy) or because they don't think the game is suited to mouse control.
I don't think the game is going to be a "simple arcade game" either, they say Medal of Honour and GTA parody, so it'll at least have FPS sections and driving/shooting sections.