Visual and spoken references to The Simpsons TV show, as well as to popular movies and fads, are frequent. By and large, however, the whole game is a delicious send-up of the video game industry. When you fall into a pit, bounce off a trampoline, or act out some other video game cliché, Comic Book Guy will appear on the upper screen and say a few words about it. One level is a sweatshop, in which dwarves that look suspiciously similar to Mario, Luigi, and Sonic toil while you constantly battle fireball-throwing people who are dressed up just like Ryu from Street Fighter 2. In another level, you have to stop Will Wright, creator of The Sims, from destroying an 8-bit game cartridge. As you jump across falling platforms and pull levers to break the factory, he'll fly around on his Sim crystal chariot and utter comments like "It's OK, Will, just think about your money." Some levels are specifically patterned after classic games. You'll hop across floating logs to reach the other side of a pond, you'll climb a multilevel factory to reach an ape that's tossing barrels at you, you'll traverse a top-view dungeon beating up enemies and the huts they spawn out of in search of keys that'll unlock the exit, and so on. There's even a Homer virtual pet you can feed and play with whenever you're not tackling a mission.
Within the missions, the hand-drawn backdrops and characters bear a striking resemblance to their TV counterparts. The style is crude but detailed--just like the Simpsons cartoon show. Loads of familiar characters appear as enemies, bosses, or in whimsical cameos, and you'll be treated to a good variety of vocal comments as you interact with those characters and the environment. Before and after each mission, animated clips featuring the actual voice actors from the cartoon play out to move the story along. These clips are lengthy, and the overall quality of the video and audio is top-notch. More importantly, the quality of dialogue, the sense of humor in the delivery, and the artistic quality of the animation are all just as good as what you see in the episodes you watch on TV.
You'll journey through the land of Pie-rule and trade attacks with Turdle, an obvious send-off of Pokémon's Squirtle.
One nugget of information that may or may not be important to you is the game's T rating, which wasn't assigned just because every level involves beating the stuffing out of the transformed people of Springfield. Some characters actually speak off-color dialogue. At one point, Will Wright ends a sentence, no doubt inspired by Chappelle's Show, with the word that means female dog or cranky woman. In an animated scene, Bart and Homer stop to relieve themselves on someone's lawn. These naughty words and happenings fit the context of the situations they're presented in, so they don't seem out of place. However, this is definitely one of those instances where the rating is a strong suggestion not to put the game into the hands of young children, unless you want to risk them learning a few colorful words and perhaps doing something disgusting on your plants.
The most disappointing thing about the game is that it takes only about four hours to get through all 20 or so missions. You can tack another hour onto that tally if you intend to go back and replay missions to collect any bottle caps, Malibu Stacy tickets, or other collectible items you may have missed. On the upside, the touch-sensitive map of Springfield makes it easy to replay individual missions and minigames, and to rewatch animated clips. You can also kill time by taking advantage of the multiplayer mode, which lets you compete in combat and keep-away games with as many as three other people using multiple DS systems and a single game cartridge. Whether five-plus hours is too short or just right is up to you. Either way, The Simpsons Game for the Nintendo DS is one heck of a ride while it lasts.
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