punkrawka's Full Review: The Simpsons Skateboarding for PlayStation 2
It was with slight dread that I went out and rented Simpsons Skateboarding for PlayStation 2. What could I expect after the essential mediocrity of Simpsons Road Rage? The answer: more of the same.
In its entire history, the one thing The Simpsons has really failed to do is translate its success into original, entertaining video games. From the old-school NES games through the Simpsons Wrestling for PlayStation, fans have been trained to expect a humorous, original show with stale, rehashed video game translations. Simpsons Skateboarding does little or nothing to buck this trend.
The graphics here are the first point of note. The characters look nice and stand as the best 3-D interpretation of the characters to date. Unfortunately, though, the graphics during gameplay fail to do the basic drawings justice. The images end up slightly hazy, and the visuals always feel at least one step behind the actual events coming from the player's controller and the system's processor.
The second failing is gameplay. The entire interface reeks of a bad Tony Hawk knockoff. The controls are eerily similar, but much slower to respond and harder to manipulate into successful tricks. The skaters have a difficult time getting up to speed, making it extremely difficult to get a good string of tricks started. Even if one can get such a string going, though, many of the resulting manipulations are equally difficult. Holding a grind not only operates exactly as it would in Tony Hawk, but also responds much more slowly, and the balance indicator takes up far too much space on the screen in its attempt to look more cartoon-like.
Much like past Simpsons efforts, this game's only real distinguishing quality is the characters' one-liners and interactions during gameplay. The most intriguing aspect of continued gameplay is to unlock extra characters and levels, bringing a good percentage of the fictional world of Springfield to life.
Unfortunely, there's really very little ultimate purpose in doing so when the game itself offers very little incentive. Even playing new levels with new characters yields a frustrating interface with choppy rendering. In reality, there's almost no one who wouldn't do better to check out Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 instead of this game, to get a better glimpse of the PS2's awesome abilities, with new levels, skaters and tricks to keep interest.
Simpsons Skateboarding is only the latest continuation of a disappointing series of video game knockoffs. It takes an old platform and adds its own characters and levels, losing a lot of quality in the process. Someday, some company will manage to translate the magic of The Simpsons into an outstanding video game. Today is not that day, though, and most gamers would do best to skip this game for anything but momentary entertainment value.
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2010 Shopping.com, Inc.