Posted by Bob Mackey
Were you aware that newly-released XBox Live Arcade game Castle Crashers is a revival of the old arcade genre known as the beat-em-up (or brawler) that flourished in a roughly five-year period? Of course you are. You're reading a gaming blog, for Christ's sake.
But you might not be aware of this absolute fact: The Simpsons, Konami's take on the genre--seemingly perfected a few years earlier with their own Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles--is the best damned beat-em-up to ever exist. Here's a brief reminder:
Capcom would eventually move things to the next level with their Dungeons and Dragons arcade games, but no beat-em-up was more fun than The Simpsons.
I speak not from nostalgia; for some reason, you can still find The Simpsons everywhere, and I took advantage of this abundance of 17 year-old arcade machines with a recent three-person playthrough at an arcade in the suburbs of Chicago. What I love about the game is just how damned exuberant it is; everything is moving, bouncing, and hyper-animated--albeit slightly off-model. And even though Konami barely had two seasons' worth of material to work with, they sure crammed a hell of a lot of characters into the game, with an incredible attention to detail; mainstays like Itchy and Scratchy may be conspicuously absent(and replaced with a Life in Hell character), but you can pick up a mallet from Milhouse and use Santa's Little Helper as a projectile weapon. You takes what you gets.
What I find most charming about The Simpsons as an adult is that it's something I'm incredibly familiar with filtered through a Japanese developer who were doing the best they could with an incredibly-foreign product. Simpsons continuity nerds may grumble at Smithers as a bomb-throwing jewel thief instead of a mild-mannered sycophant, or writhe in anguish when the arcade game places Moe's Tavern hundreds of feet under a cemetery, but these are the things that make me light up with glee. And only secret commentary-listening nerds like me know that the rabbit ears visible under Marge's beehive when she's hit with an electric attack were something that Matt Groening had been planning as a sight gag in the early years of the show. We can only assume someone would've tried to stop him.
So now that beat-em-ups are back and great again, can this mean the same for The Simpsons? I'm holding my breath.
Please pray for me.
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About Bob Mackey
For a brief period of time I was Bull from TV's
Night Court, but some of you may know me from the humor column I wrote for Youngstown State University's The Jambar, Kent State University's The Stater, and Youngstown's alternative newspaper, The Walruss. I'm perhaps most well-known for my bi-weekly pieces on Something Awful. I've also blogged for Valley24.com and have written articles for EGM, 1UP, GameSpite and Cracked. For all of my writing over the years, I have made a total of twenty American dollars. It's also said that I draw cartoons, which people have described with words such as "legible." I kidnapped the Lindbergh Baby and am looking to do so again in the future.
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