Way back in the glory days of 2001, when The Simpsons and Crazy taxi were both at the height of their popularity, a little game called The Simpsons Road Rage smashed the two together to create something magical. Maybe not magical. More like okay-ish. Certainly not anything great, but at least it isn't freaking terrible like Simpsons Skateboarding or Simpsons Wrestling. Read on for more about Simpsons Road Rage and to watch gameplay video.
The Simpsons is so weird because it's been going for 30+ seasons now, but almost all of the video games based on it appeared in the first half of its run. That was back in the day when terrible low-effort licensed games were the norm, I guess, but it's still weird to not have any new games based on The Simpsons since EA's The Simpsons Game in 2007. Instead, we got a bunch of terrible games released back in the early days when The Simpsons was actually good. Now that The Simpsons is boring and bad the games would probably be amazing, right?
One of the least terrible of those Simpsons games was The Simpsons Road Rage, a Crazy Taxi spoof that is kind of actually fun. A game where you drive around Springfield while all of the major characters are constantly quipping and yucking it up sounds like a good idea to me, and it was pretty well executed. There's a ton of playable characters and there is usually unique dialogue depending on who you're playing as and who you pick up. It's packed full of references and homages to the first 10 or so seasons of the show and it's great.
It does start to get repetitive pretty quickly - both gameplay and "comedy" - , though, and the maps you play on are far from accurate depictions of Springfield, but it's fun for a while.
I never played Simpsons Road Rage until I recorded this video, so I'm sure my expectations were properly in line compared to people that excitedly bought it alongside their freshly launched GameCube or OG Xbox in 2001. It was probably wildly disappointing back then (for $50+) but in 2019 (for free ...) it ain't too bad. I'm glad I finally played it.
