The Simpsons - Road Rage

Mr. Burns buys the Springfield transit authority and replaces the buses with nuclear-powered ones that gas the passengers. That is the excuse for everything that follows: the townspeople need lifts, the Simpsons and their neighbours have cars, and every dollar of fare money goes toward buying the transit system back. It is a wonderfully stupid premise, and it does exactly the job a premise needs to do in an arcade driving game, which is to get out of the way.

What it is, plainly, is Crazy Taxi wearing a Fox licence. Sega thought so too and took Fox to court over it. You pick a driver, a hitchhiking Springfielder appears with an arrow pointing at their destination, and you tear across town with a timer bleeding down while the meter counts up. Radical Entertainment understood the important part of that formula: the shortcut. Springfield is built to be abused. You can cut through the Kwik-E-Mart forecourt, ride the pavement past Moe's, bounce off the Aztec Theater, and take a hill jump that puts you into the front of somebody's house. Damage is cosmetic and consequence-free, which is entirely correct for the tone.

The roster is where the licence earns its money. Homer's pink sedan, Marge's station wagon, Barney's plow truck, Apu, Otto's school bus, Snake, the Sunday-driving Grampa, all with different handling and mostly awful top speeds, unlocked with fares alongside new streets and landmarks. The voice work is from the actual cast, and it is used more heavily than most tie-ins of the period bothered with. The lines loop, though, and they loop fast. Ten minutes in, you will have heard everything Comic Book Guy has to say about your driving.

The PS2 version runs the town at a decent clip but the world is small and the draw distance shows its seams, with buildings and pedestrians materialising close in. Handling is loose in the way arcade drivers of the era often were, all weight transfer and no grip, which makes the collisions funnier than the cornering. There is a two-player head-to-head mode and a set of driving challenges that stretch things past the basic loop, but nothing here has depth on its mind.

It holds up better than most licensed cash-ins of 2001, mainly because the thing it copied was worth copying and Springfield was a genuinely good idea for a compact, breakable playground. It runs out of new jokes long before it runs out of fares, but for a couple of hours it is the closest a game got to letting you drive through the show.