The Simpsons Preview

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Elsewhere, all the voice actors from the show are involved and there's over 8000 lines of dialogue. Lard Lad crops up as a boss and you'll have to shoot his ass-hatch. Bart fires cans of 'dolphin unfriendly' tuna at zombie dolphins. Kent Brockman provides an EA Sports-style commentary. Does he keep repeating his lines? Yes, he does! The gags just keep on coming.

The visual style of The Simpsons is one of the strongest draws of the game. The initially flat-looking, cel-shaded world is deep and detailed, really bringing to life a cartoon world. There's no doubt about where you are, and all the characters are well modelled and animated as you'd expect. It's almost understated how complete-looking Springfield and the various surrounding levels are. It looks so good you may not even notice how well made it is.

There seems to be a healthy amount of environmental interaction going on as well, so it doesn't feel like characters are clunking around a pre-rendered world. Air vents will boost Bartman to unreachable heights, so as the player pushes, the game world pushes back. "This is The Godfather engine. We've been working on it for a little over two years and we managed to share technology with The Godfather team," offers Almassizadeh (but don't let that put you off).

Repetitive enemies? You can get away with it when you point out it's a cliché!

Although it's fashionable to mention that The Simpsons show isn't nearly as funny as it used to be, there are elements of the subversive humour that peppered classic episodes - it's not all slipping on banana skins. Medal of Homer sees Bart and his old man parachute into a French village where the occupants surrendered after the German's threw just one stone. It's your objective to snatch all the flags off the cowardly villagers, playing on the old, 'the French always surrender at the first sniff of conflict' stereotype. Medal of Homer is also a better example of the videogame parody, with a building modelled on Wolfenstein 3D, complete with 8-bit graphics and textures from 1992.

Would you play it if you could strip the Simpsons branding off it? That's debatable and missing the point somewhat. The beauty of such a strong license is that it can liven up the most average of games. I didn't play through half of the Futurama tie-in because I was enjoying the gameplay, but because Bender and Zoidberg are just funny. The Simpsons Hit & Run didn't sell forever because it was a great sandbox game, but because you could drive up to and go inside Apu's Kwik-E-Mart. The Simpsons seems fun and cheeky, solid and perfectly playable. Sometimes it's that simple. As simple as laughing at a fat Homer.