Anticipating that this year’s “downsized” E3 will be a complete washout attended almost exclusively by American journalists (for this correspondent, unable to find anyone to take me to it, it will be the first E3 I have missed – hopefully, it will also be the last one ever), the mighty Electronic Arts, characteristically, decided to take matters into its own hands and put on its own showcase of games due for 2007 release. Called EA3 (in previous years, the corresponding fixture has been known, dodgily, as Hot Summer Nights) and taking place at EA’s development building in Marina Del Rey, LA, rather than its HQ at Redwood Shores just up from San Francisco, it afforded a great chance to get a good look at EA’s big guns for the year.
With The Simpsons movie coming out, EA has picked up the licence for the much-loved cartoon, and I can report that the resulting game most emphatically will not be a Crazy Taxi clone. It’s an odd one, though, and we wouldn’t want to opine on whether it will be great or crap until we’ve played it through. For starters, there’s its look. Apparently, EA developed three new graphics technologies to make it look exactly like the cartoon. Which it certainly does – but that means it is entirely free of textures and, although 3D, looks two-dimensional. To look at, you’d imagine that it would run quite happily on a PSOne.
It’s a third-person action-adventure meets platform game, in which action and puzzle sequences intermingle. And it has a very odd premise indeed – it doesn’t follow the film at all. Instead, the premise, according to a spokesman, was: “Imagine what would happen if the Simpsons figured out they had been licensed to yet another videogame”, which is either seriously post-modern, or just plain arch. Either way, it allows the developer to put the Simpsons in countless pastiches of videogames. So you get level titles like Medal of Homer, Shadow of the Colossal Doughnut and Grand Theft Scratchy. At times, you’ll find yourself doing things like playing Frogger with Lisa. And at others, performing Half-Life 2-style physics puzzles.
Each of the Simpsons – and you play as them all – has an alter-ego with super-powers, so Bart, for example, becomes Bartman, with a slingshot, while Homer becomes a huge inflated ball who can be rolled around, Marble Madness-style. Lisa can summon the Hand of Buddha, which puts you into a top-down perspective and lets you lift and move pretty much anything. All The Simpsons characters, no matter how peripheral, appear at some stage – from Lard Lad, via Selma and Patty to Kent Brockman.
There’s a narrative thrust to the game which unfolds – EA claims it includes material equivalent to two-and-a-half episodes of The Simpsons – and the original Simpsons writers have been involved. A typical level involving Lisa, for example, is based on the story that Montgomery Burns has decreed that each tree in Springfield must be cut down so it can be made into a single luxury toothpick and Lisa, as she would, has to stop him. All the levels – there are 16 split into four chapters – can be played co-operatively by two people, and if you’re playing on your own, you’ll have to switch between characters frequently.
The DS version has one cute-looking mini-game: a Pet Homer, who lies on his couch scratching his balls and so on, ready for you to mess around with. The Simpsons Game is certainly unusual, and very wacky indeed. But whether it actually proves to be coherent and fun to play remains to be seen.
With The Simpsons movie coming out, EA has picked up the licence for the much-loved cartoon, and I can report that the resulting game most emphatically will not be a Crazy Taxi clone. It’s an odd one, though, and we wouldn’t want to opine on whether it will be great or crap until we’ve played it through. For starters, there’s its look. Apparently, EA developed three new graphics technologies to make it look exactly like the cartoon. Which it certainly does – but that means it is entirely free of textures and, although 3D, looks two-dimensional. To look at, you’d imagine that it would run quite happily on a PSOne.
It’s a third-person action-adventure meets platform game, in which action and puzzle sequences intermingle. And it has a very odd premise indeed – it doesn’t follow the film at all. Instead, the premise, according to a spokesman, was: “Imagine what would happen if the Simpsons figured out they had been licensed to yet another videogame”, which is either seriously post-modern, or just plain arch. Either way, it allows the developer to put the Simpsons in countless pastiches of videogames. So you get level titles like Medal of Homer, Shadow of the Colossal Doughnut and Grand Theft Scratchy. At times, you’ll find yourself doing things like playing Frogger with Lisa. And at others, performing Half-Life 2-style physics puzzles.
Each of the Simpsons – and you play as them all – has an alter-ego with super-powers, so Bart, for example, becomes Bartman, with a slingshot, while Homer becomes a huge inflated ball who can be rolled around, Marble Madness-style. Lisa can summon the Hand of Buddha, which puts you into a top-down perspective and lets you lift and move pretty much anything. All The Simpsons characters, no matter how peripheral, appear at some stage – from Lard Lad, via Selma and Patty to Kent Brockman.
There’s a narrative thrust to the game which unfolds – EA claims it includes material equivalent to two-and-a-half episodes of The Simpsons – and the original Simpsons writers have been involved. A typical level involving Lisa, for example, is based on the story that Montgomery Burns has decreed that each tree in Springfield must be cut down so it can be made into a single luxury toothpick and Lisa, as she would, has to stop him. All the levels – there are 16 split into four chapters – can be played co-operatively by two people, and if you’re playing on your own, you’ll have to switch between characters frequently.
The DS version has one cute-looking mini-game: a Pet Homer, who lies on his couch scratching his balls and so on, ready for you to mess around with. The Simpsons Game is certainly unusual, and very wacky indeed. But whether it actually proves to be coherent and fun to play remains to be seen.
Companies:
Electronic Arts
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