A to Z Challenge: Hit & Run (The Simpsons)

 There have been games based on The Simpsons since the original NES in the early 90s.  I have two games for my PS2.  The first, Road Rage, was an OK game where you just drive various vehicles from the Simpsons universe to race people and stuff.

Hit & Run is a much better game that like The Godfather in my previous entry applies more of an open-world concept to let you somewhat experience the world of the TV show.  And like The Godfather, there are missions (starting with the "easy tutorial level") that have you go a bunch of places and meet a bunch of characters.  Sometimes you have to race someone or find stuff or do something silly like help Cletus collect his "flat meat" from the road.  There are 7 total levels and each one you get to be a different character:  Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, or Apu.  Each character has different phrases they'll use periodically.

The game does a good job of working in a ton of Simpsons references and locations.  Besides the Simpsons house (and Flanders') you have the school, church, power plant, Qwik-E-Mart, Android's Dungeon, and many more places.  You don't necessarily get to fully explore these places, but they are at least there.

The town is divided into a few different sections.  You start in the Simpsons neighborhood.  There's another section for downtown and another by the water and another up in the hills.

Since it's called Hit & Run, a lot of what you do is driving.  You get the Simpsons car and other vehicles from the show (at that point, which was maybe like Season 15 or 16?) like a monster truck, a Shriners car, the Car Designed By Homer, and the rocket car bought by the bum who created Itchy & Scratchy.  You can even swipe the pink Cadillac that crashed into the Planet Hollywood-type place.  If you're a fan of the show--or were a fan until it jumped the shark about fifty times--it's a lot of fun just to have sort of a 3D version of Springfield to play around in.

Since it's somewhat open world, you can do the missions or you can just fool around, stealing cars and driving around Springfield.  One fun thing to do is rev the rocket car up and jump it off a ramp just to see how high you can get before smashing back down.  I also liked the Stonecutters tunnel that's complete with the classical music used in the show.  Near the end of the missions, the game transforms Springfield into a Halloween-themed version where you can drive around in the car from the "Homega Man" episode and stuff like that.

The actual "story" of the game is pretty silly and actually rips off a South Park episode where the boys find out Earth is the setting of a reality show.  Or maybe South Park ripped them off.  It's something I ripped off for Chet Finley vs The Machines of Fate only instead of just a reality show the aliens are making bets on human behavior.  While a sequel would have been rad the developer lost the rights before one could be made.

I haven't played the game in a while and at one point I loaned them to my sister, who probably lost them.  I'm sure by now they've made other Simpsons games, but this one is my favorite.