There are also a number of gags and collectible items strewn about the town. Gags vary from location to location and can be interactive or simply in the background. For instance, walking into the Kwik-E-Mart contains a couple of different gags. Walk to the back, and you find Jasper, or "Frostillicus," encased within a freezer. Interacting with him will cause him to start shivering, and he'll throw you one of a few different one-liners. On the other hand, if you simply stand near one section of shelves, one of a few different gags will unfold in front of you--including Hans Moleman's mugging by Snake the convict or Krusty the Clown's ogling of an "adult" magazine. You can also find a number of collectible items around town, like wrenches that fix damage to your car and trading cards that reference different items from various episodes of the show. These cards cover a pretty wide spectrum of references. They range from the Mr. Sparkle box (which coincidentally bears Homer's likeness) to the evil Krusty doll that tried to kill Homer in one of the infamous "Treehouse of Horror" episodes. Each card also contains info about the episode in which the item appears and a quotation related to it.
All told, Simpsons: Hit & Run does a really great job of making the world of Springfield an incredible backdrop for an entertaining gameplay experience. If there's one knock against it that keeps it from being a truly superb experience, though, it's that the game just isn't quite as polished as it could have been. One of the less-frequent, but still quite notable, issues in the game is that occasionally bugs pop up that break missions. Occasionally, AI-controlled cars find themselves in stuck situations where they are absolutely unable to get to the required destinations in the allotted time. For example, in one instance, a CPU car actually drove off a cliff, and the game respawned the car in a spot where it could not feasibly get back on the highway. Thankfully, the game lets you restart missions at any time by simply selecting the restart option from the pause menu (another feature that, actually, would have been really nice to have in the GTA series). You always start right back at the beginning point of the mission, without having to drive all the way back to the starting point, so this issue is relegated to a periodic nuisance rather than a serious problem.
All your favorite characters are along for the ride in Hit ? Run, including such popular Springfieldians as Krusty the Clown, Principal Skinner, Dr. Hibbart, Comic Book Guy, and, everyone's favorite wacky neighbor, Ned Flanders.
The bulk of the game's polish issues lie in its graphics--primarily in the game's somewhat sloppy camera system. When you're driving around, Hit & Run's camera actually works just fine in all three available camera views. However, when you're walking around town, the camera has a pretty heavy tendency to bug out at random. This is especially prevalent in any situation where you get too close to a building or find yourself near any piece of scenery that could possibly get in the way of the camera's set path. You can move the camera with the right analog stick, but in some situations it simply can't be moved to a better angle. Hit & Run is also not immune to some basic frame rate problems, especially when you're driving a heavily damaged car, as the smoke effects used to denote car damage pretty much wreck the frame rate to a fairly significant degree. Clipping is also a problem in many areas--especially any time you get too close to a destructible object.
However, with the bad comes plenty of good as well. While the game may lack polish, it still looks quite good overall. Hit & Run uses a simple, but effective, 3D design that actually makes all of the characters look a bit like Homer from his brush with the third dimension (in another "Treehouse of Horror" episode). The character models aren't heavily detailed, but they look very close to their television counterparts and animate quite nicely.
Hit ? Run features a wonderfully detailed version of Springfield, with all the primary landmarks and locations--and a number of less obvious ones as well.
Significantly more impressive is the amount of detail put into the design of Springfield itself. The different levels of the game are broken up into three specific sections of Springfield, each with its own separate identity. One is the suburban area, which houses the Simpsons' home, another is the city's downtown area, and the last is in and around the city's harbor area. Aside from the obvious landmarks, Hit & Run also hosts a ton of slightly less obvious locales, such as Chester Lampwick's solid gold house, the gigantic Lard Lad Donut statue, and even the now-defunct monorail station. In terms of performance, all three console versions of the game actually run similarly. The Xbox version gets the nod for a slightly smoother look and better overall frame rate. Both the PS2 and GameCube versions look practically identical, though the GameCube version is just a tad less jaggy.
The last and best part of The Simpsons: Hit & Run is its sound, which is really spectacularly done. All of the show's primary voice talents reprise their roles for the game, and the result is an excellent atmosphere created by the game's dialogue. This is also thanks, in no small part, to Hit & Run's writing, as the story was actually penned by writers from the TV show. The cutscenes, in-game dialogue, and even the wacky one-liners are all very snappy and surprisingly topical. Overall, each aspect of the game's dialogue does its job superbly. Hit & Run's music is also extremely well done. Most of the main score feels like it was ripped from some of the best seasons of the show, and the remaining music tracks are all very nice. Additionally, each of the playable characters has his or her own style of background music. For example, when Lisa walks around town, you hear periodic saxophone music, and when Apu is driving, the soundtrack mimics a Bollywood-esque chase sequence, with sitars and electric guitars dueling it out. The only possible complaint to mount against the game's audio presentation is that in certain cases--namely when driving--one-liners have a tendency to repeat a little too often. Hearing Homer yell "Outta my way, jerkass!" is really hilarious, but hearing him yell it on a constant basis can wear a bit thin. This is a very minor complaint in the grand scheme of things though, and, really, it's hard to find much wrong with Hit & Run's audio.
In practically every way you can think of, Hit & Run is really the best video game representation of the Simpsons universe ever created.
In every way that matters, The Simpsons: Hit & Run is the game that Simpsons fans have been pining for ever since the days of Bart vs. The Space Mutants. It creates the most accurate representation of the world of Springfield ever put into a game, and it manages to make the gameplay surrounding it quite a lot of fun. Additionally, the game's overall sense of humor is delightfully self-referential, and any hardcore Simpsons enthusiast should have a blast exploring the various levels and pointing out the numerous obscure locations and characters that pop up. It's a bit of a shame that the game does have the few bugs and graphical issues that it does, but ultimately, these few problems shouldn't deter you from checking out what is easily the best Simpsons game released to date. If you're a fan of the show, you owe it to yourself to give The Simpsons: Hit & Run a look.
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