Fun in extremely short bursts but once you try to play it for real, the flaws show up. The end game is both brutally hard and completely unfun, the character quips happen way too frequently to the point that turning down the character voices becomes mandatory and there isn't much variety in mission structure. It's mostly just 'drive from point a to point b but really fast.' The game it took inspiration from, Grand Theft Auto, at least mixes things up a little better.

That said, I think the fanservice in this game is really solid because it generally sticks to the golden age of Simpsons. So if you like the cartoon as much as I do, it's worth playing. Just don't expect the masterpiece a lot of people think this game is.

A recent review said they heard someone say something about the purity of this game, and for my money, it is an apt description, far more precise than the neglect with which contemporary perspectives treat this - like it or hate it - monument in the medium's history. Only nineties kids (and probably those older) remember how incredible this game felt upon launch: Liberty City, murder sprees, tanks, celebrity voice acting, a shockingly good radio that kept you seated and eager as the fires consumed the car you jacked in some grand theft auto that began your umpteenth downtown massacre. Unbelievable stuff. You stood at the edge of the beach and breathed in the possibility that surrounded you.

Things have aged of course, but to me for some reason they are nowhere near as interesting to talk about. One returns to that idea of purity, and with the fireworks faded, one recognizes in 2021 how dark the shadows are at night, how dour the clouds, how graceful the rain as their pitter-patter gracelessly scores this city. Back then, when the game was a revolution, the city felt so alive and open. Only now has the rust revealed reality. This is a small and dead city, a small and dead game, starring a small and dead psychopath more or less destined to kill pedestrians and do missions. But this is not diminishment, rather, one now sees clearly the charms of this game, some twenty years on. The ocean of a childhood was just a piss puddle at daybreak in New York City.

Claude the protagonist is betrayed in the beginning, betrays his later allies, hunts down his betrayer, and possibly kills the only person he loved for talking too much. That's it. That's purity. That's what somehow makes this game better than Vice City, Scarface drained of de Palma, Pacino, and pathos. By contrast, GTA III lost nothing: it was content to make nothing its tone, atmosphere, story, character, and theme. Of all the GTA games, then, this one is invulnerable to the ever-looming (thankfully nowadays much less bandied about) accusation of ludonarrative dissonance. There is no conflict between story and gameplay. You are a killer and nothing but. Have fun. I did and do.

What the fuck. This game is incredible. Why does no one talk about this? Oh my gosh. I would put it up there alongside games like Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood as being one of the absolute greatest action-platformers I've ever played in my life. Great balance between challenging platforming, methodically-paced combat, and boss fights that demand both a mastery of the mechanics, as well as the patience to learn their attack patterns. It's a disservice that more people don't talk about this one.

I 1CCed this game. mwehe

looking back to the miserable state of the games industry in the seventh generation, i have to say that the feverish cries to find the citizen kane of gaming - basically paltry, philistine shorthand for the holy grail of the medium, a work that legitimizes the practice and is enshrined in the canon - were super funny, not only because of the obvious nod to that works strengths with relation to filmmaking (which cant be replicated in games wholesale), but also way more specifically because that movie is the direct result of several contextual, social, and political factors that basically 100% mean games will literally never, ever get their own citizen kane. the last of us, for a time, was that 'citizen kane', in the eyes of many. which is insane because this title introduces literally nothing new in the AAA environ through either storytelling, mechanics, or structure (even when it was released it was patchwork pastiche of everything that came before it) and on top of that it was heavily corporate funded focus-tested prestige slush which in effect fully betrays the idea of this game being a ‘citizen kane’ type. a citizen kane of the medium would have to do more than be soulless and perfunctory interactivity Big Video Games decide for you has artistic merit - i'd even go one step further to say that if anything, Big Video Games would probably frown on the citizen kane of video games, similarly to how orson welles legacy was attacked and dismantled by hollywoods vanguard again and again, and again and again and again. it amuses me this is happening yet again with god of war but what can i say i guess it's tough being a sore winner