The Simpsons: Hit & Run

I've had this on PC since I was a kid, and then something like 4 years ago, this became my 'speedrun' game. I've always enjoyed playing it, and speedrunning gave me an excuse to keep revisiting it. The mods kept that perpetuity going even further, and even now, I fully expect to revisit this more in the future. My online 'phase' of streaming SHAR has shifted to the past, as I've lost most of my interest with broadcasting my gameplay to the internet. So now, most of my interaction with the internet at the moment fall into these reviews! And as such, my use of video games as some bizarre form of interaction with others continues. Hit and Run has once again become the medium.

When I say I used to speedrun SHAR, that isn't my way of telling you how good I am, or how much of the game I know by heart. It's my way of letting you know just how much time I've wasted playing it. Ultimately, getting good at any game boils down to how much time you're willing to put into it, and I've put so much time into the game, that the infamously difficult last mission has become somewhat trivial. As it turns out, sometimes all it takes is a small amount of new understanding to reveal the truth behind the game's design.

The last mission of Hit and Run is deceptively difficult for psychological reasons. Consider that there are three missions prior to the last one that feature a very similar objective. 'Pocket Protector', and then first two 'Alien Auto-topsy' missions. Pocket Protector starts you out at the power plant with a flat 100 seconds to get to the playground and deliver nuclear waste into a UFO. It has the same objective of trying to avoid hitting walls or traffic, as a hard enough impact will cause the waste to explode. Yet, nobody remembers Pocket Protector, mostly because the Hover Car that you use is really light. And in this game, lighter cars require harder impacts to drop the waste. The next waste mission is 'Auto-topsy Part I' which comes right after the infamous platforming section. This mission lets the player use their own car, though in most cases, the player will be driving the 70s Sports Car, which is both heavier and faster than the Hover Car. Either way, the player is given a 100 second time limit again to do the same task, meaning this mission is not much harder. 'Alien Auto-topsy II' forces the player to use the Bandit, which has a similar weight and driving style to the 70s Sports Car. In addition to driving from the plant, you also have to drive to the plant under a time limit. That isn't difficult, though it means you have a whole extra minute of gameplay on your hands if you blow up the waste far enough away from the power plant. Once you grab the waste, you're given a 95 second time limit, which is only 5 seconds shorter than before.

Alien Auto-topsy III is much different, however. You are given a Jeep with a rocket strapped onto it (which can't be unlocked through normal means). This is not only one of the fastest vehicles, but one of the heavier ones, meaning it takes less of an impact for the waste to blow up. Once you get to the power plant, the player is given a 60 second time limit to get to the playground, which will naturally cause them to rush like a madman. However, this is a fake time limit. Even if you're a speedrunner, you can't get to the playground in 60 seconds unless you clip out of bounds. Instead, this time limit only lasts until you get near the Simpsons house. Once you get there, you will find the black alien car blocking the player's usual neighborhood jump shortcut. That is placed there for a reason, though most players will completely ignore this reason due to the design not being entirely clear enough. The intention is for the player to go around the normal jump shortcut, which will line them up for a different shortcut that cuts through the grass and launches them over a house towards the Kwik-e-mart. By this point, a first time player will likely not know about this shortcut, as it's unused for the entire game up to this point. The normal jump shortcut near the Simpsons house jumps right past it, leaving the player little chance to discover it for themselves. So instead, what players will do is slow down and wait for the black car to move out of the way so they can take the jump, anyways. Doing this makes the ending of the mission far more difficult than it should be. The player is given one last 30 second time limit to get to the playground. If you took the correct jump, this time limit will start once you're next to the Kwik-e-mart, which is completely manageable. If you took the normal shortcut, like most players do, this 30 second timer will start when you're all the way down the street from the Kwik-e-mart, making this last stretch an extremely tight one. One that weaves through a lot of traffic and awkward turns and shortcuts. In addition to all this, the shorter time limits mean that the player will be less careful about avoiding obstacles on the road, meaning a Hit and Run police chase is far more likely to happen.

Many of the missions have these sorts of punishing time limits that assume the player is taking the 'correct' shortcuts, which means finding the fastest route for every scenario is just as important as driving well. When the loading screens tell you to look for the Krusty Glass to find shortcuts, they aren't kidding! Each of the three maps generally follow a circular path as opposed to the spiderweb of roads in the previous taxi-based Simpsons driving game, Road Rage. Once you find a good shortcut in Hit and Run, it will almost always be a good shortcut in every scenario where it is applicable. There are not many different objectives the game wants to throw at you either. By the time you finish the 8th mission (the first mission in Bart's first level), you've already seen every possible objective aside from the waste missions at the end. They only get more demanding the further you get.

There are only four missions that involve platforming, though digging through the game's unused audio files reveal that they intended to have a lot more of them. Blind Big Brother (the box kicking mission in level 1) is the only mission that has the player running around destroying things on foot, though every character has their own 'box destroying' voice lines, implying that every level was going to have one of these missions. Thankfully, only a few missions force you to get out of your vehicle (something that many other open-world games need to learn), since the driving is the strong part of Hit and Run. The platforming is floaty, which makes it easy to fall off of tight platforms. You will have to deal with this often if you're trying to collect every bonus card in the game. Either way, I'm just glad I can play an open world game without guns in it, so I don't have to deal with poorly designed shooting segments...

The driving physics are also floaty, but in a unique way that makes this feel unlike any other driving game. The developers of the game wanted to make sure that the cars wouldn't ever flip over on their roof, so the physics are constantly fighting against the car to keep it on its tires, which can lead to some bizarre bouncing around. This might sound awful, but trying to wrangle the car turns out to be more fun than annoying. You're always trying to prevent a hit and run, which is caused when you hit too many objects, pedestrians, cars, etc, with your car. Police cars will come after you, and if they manage to slow you to a stop, you lose 50 coins. This can be very annoying if you're saving up money for a vehicle, because there are a lot of forced purchases. Meaning, you have to grind out a lot of coins. Many of these missions force you do drive through areas with a lot of pedestrians or obstacles, making a hit and run nearly inevitable. This causes the missions with tight time limits to become much harder (i.e. Set to Kill). The hit and run meter is especially annoying on the last level, because it drains far slower than the other levels, and the place is littered with obstacles.

The game's simplicity is a strong point. At its most complex, it's a collectathon game with a somewhat linear (or circular) level design. It has all the strong points of good racing games. The variety of cars is impressive even for a racing game's standards, let alone a licensed driving game. This makes the racing feel more fun than games like Grand Theft Auto and Driver. The bonus races are cute, as well, and honestly I think I would enjoy playing a whole Simpsons racing game that used similar physics and similar track design.

Finally, this is the most Simpsons game out of all the Simpsons games. Everything is referential to the show's 'golden' years, including the cars, the characters, the buildings, the locations, and tons of little bonuses scattered throughout. And the dialogue is funny! Not all of it, since some lines get repeated often and are annoying, but the interactions are as close to the good Simpsons humor that the fans would be looking for in the first place. I don't think anyone will want to revisit the game's story, but it's worth playing through the game once without skipping any dialogue.