The Simpsons
It's coming Homer.
Smart casual
The Wii version in particular has been designed with more casual gamers in mind. Characters fill their power-up meters much faster than in the PS3 and 360 versions, for instance. Other differences include the inevitable incorporation of Wii remote moves - you jerk it to make Homer do his burp attack, for example - and the inclusion of mini-games which don't appear in the other versions.
These include Bartwings, a Pilotwings rip-off where you guide Bart through a series of rings using the remote. Then there's Bite Night, where you're in a boxing ring facing an opponent across a dinner table. Plates of food appear and you use the remote and nunchuk to either swipe them away (in the case of cabbage, broccoli etc.) or gobble them up (burgers, waffles), scoring points for eating junk and losing them for consuming healthy stuff.
The PSP version of The Simpsons isn't on show today but Rizzer does give us a sneak peek at the DS game. "We're traditionally known for not putting a whole lot of effort into our DS SKUs," Rizzer admits, "So it's great to put together a real companion piece. If you're buying any of the other versions, there's enough of a difference in this product to make it worth picking up."
It does seem they've taken care with the DS version. All the cutscenes from the console versions are here, complete with voiceovers ("This cartridge actually contains more lines of dialogue than any Nintendo DS cartridge ever made," apparently.) One of the neatest features is Pet Homer, a mini-game where you get to care for our hero - feeding him, shaving him and pulling out the defibrillator when he has a heart attack.
Nintendogs with less dogs and more fat men having coronaries, in other words. Like the console versions, the DS game imitates rather than innovates. There might be plenty of laughs here, but isn't a game full of clichés going to be about as much fun as... A game full of clichés? Why not do something different?
Shock and bore
"If you look at videogames right now, it's impossible for you to really say you can innovate to the degree of creating something which has never been seen before," Rizzer argues. "God of War is just one cliché after another. BioShock is just a whole set of videogame clichés that are done over and over again. If you go into a heavy combat area in BioShock, sure as hell there are explodable barrels which can be picked up and thrown at enemies
"We decided we wanted to do an action platformer. That automatically gets you thinking, well, what is an action platformer? It's jumping and navigation, with some combat. You have to work within that."
According to Rizzer, there is innovation in The Simpsons game. It comes in the form of things like the character's power-ups - Homer's burp attack, his ability to inhale helium and float round like a balloon and so on; Lisa's use of her saxophone as a defensive weapon, and the RTS-style Hand of Buddha power which allows her to attack enemies and control environments from a top-down perspective. Then there's Marge Mob, the Pikmin-inspired element. "Yeah, Pikmin's already been done before - but it was fun, it was a cool mechanic. Should we not pay homage to that?
"Personally, I feel like the action platform genre is unfortunately going away. Everything is shooters now... What happened to games like Mario 64, Sly Cooper, Beyond Good and Evil, Jak and Daxter before it became combat racing or whatever the heck that was..."
Rizzer makes no apologies for the fact that The Simpsons takes cues from these games, and he's ready to admit that it's not going to break any new ground as far as platform action gameplay goes. But he sounds confident in The Simpsons as a conscientiously designed, easily accessible and above all fun game which makes the most of the licence it's based on. Whether it has the widespread appeal of the TV show remains to be seen, but if you like platfomers it's one to watch.