The Simpsons (Arcade)

When you ask people what the best old school beat ’em ups of all time are, you wouldn’t be too surprised to hear names like Streets of Rage, Final Fight, and Double Dragon. Two were backed by enormous game companies in the form of Sega and Capcom and the last one came from Technōs Japan who practically made the brawler genre their main focus. However, there’s a stranger name that can come up in these discussions, that being the name of America’s favorite odd yellow family The Simpsons. Why a sitcom might inspire one of people’s favorite old brawlers becomes a bit less strange though when you learn it had its own big company behind it, Konami’s skill at producing excellent licensed arcade beat ’em ups exemplified in this surprise hit.

The game’s set up is simple but is conveyed through animated scenes that pretty accurately capture the feeling and style of the television show. It seems the city’s nuclear power magnate Mr. Burns has decided to be a bit more evil than usual, sending his assistant Mr. Smithers to rob a jewelry store. While the Simpson family is strolling by, they accidentally crash into Burns’s fleeing minions, a precious diamond flying up into the air and landing in the mouth of little baby Maggie. Smithers snatches the baby and takes off, Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa now having to push through all of the goons sent after them to try and keep them from reclaiming their kidnapped child. The exaggeration doesn’t just apply to the motives of the usually somewhat grounded cartoon characters, as now they’ll be heading off to beat up anybody in their path. Be they wrestlers or businessmen, sasquatches or zombies, the four family members work together while delivering voice lines, making ridiculous expressions, and if necessary, hurling the family dog and cat at enemies as weapons.

The four playable characters all have slight variations despite using the same controls. The family matron Marge swings her vacuum cleaner around and will ride it down from above to knock around enemies, rebellious young boy Bart swings his skateboard around and varies up his tricks, the bright young daughter Lisa swings her jump rope out at foes but can get tangled if she does it too quickly, and poor family figurehead Homer Simpson only uses his fists and seems to have the shortest range for it. No one is truly a poor pick though, all of them able to effectively whale on foes with basic attacks, diving strikes, and a special move used by pressing both of your buttons at once. There really isn’t much to your skills on the surface as these basics are mostly there to do the job of providing you reliable and simple attacks for the brawling, but there are a few more options that crop up along what’s likely to be about an hour long journey. If you are playing on the same cabinet with a few other players, you can approach their characters to perform team moves, these providing brief powerful attacks that the two players can pilot around the screen to deal damage. Whether its the two kids screaming around together, the parents rolling around in a wheel of death, or Marge cautioning Bart to be careful right before she hurls him around the screen like a bouncing ball, they all do provide something effective and unique to the specific pairing. Holding a greater influence over the action though are the items you find laying around, the family able to pick up objects like slingshots to fire at foes, a hammer to swing for big damage, or many objects you can throw towards enemies, some of them even requiring two people to lift like the police car. These items crop up quite often and will ask for a brief change in your battle style, especially if you picked up a persistent weapon that can make quick work of whatever enemies might lie ahead.

The waves of enemies you need to beat to progress are actually the main thing that makes The Simpsons such a memorable and interesting beat ’em up. Although they only had the first season of the show to pull from at the time of development, Konami was happy to include both ideas taken from the show and ones that just feel like a good fit. The first boss for example is a wrestler who only had a very small role in the show and Konami creates its own pair of goons, one tall and one far too short for his clothing, to serve as the bosses outside of Moe’s Tavern. For the most part throughout the adventure you do face two types of enemies, those being businessmen and a fat older fellow in a pink shirt. They are the most basic types of foes and often fill the spaces between fights with more interesting bad guys or bosses, but they don’t just stick to melee combat the whole game. Soon these grunts are upgraded to use new attacks, wield umbrellas and push brooms, use thrown items against you, come flying at you in tea cups as a carnival ride breaks open, and even hurl explosives at you. Their capabilities increase as you grow more comfortable with fighting them, and needing to get around their range advantages from new weapons means they can still pose a threat even in the late game, especially when they come in large groups.

While the two businessmen dutifully serve as the most common enemies without getting dull, the real appeal is when The Simpsons starts breaking out its stranger ideas. A trip to the theme park based on Krusty the Clown has weird rabbitmen appear to fight you, clowns bouncing around on balls, and even a giant balloon Krusty serves as the boss of the area. Moving around differently and striking with new attacks, the foes only get more unique from here, with the T.V. station conveniently filming a ninja show that means shurikens and teleporting ninjas are coming your way and the zombies in the cemetery don’t flinch when attacked meaning you can’t just bludgeon them to death with persistent attacks. The dream world is definitely the most varied and wacky, the family’s inexplicable shared dream involving them facing off with flying donuts and saxophones, avoiding smacks from Marge heads that spring from the cloud ground, and even face off with a devil version of Bart, the same sinful reinterpretation of the Simpson son having already become a familiar face to anyone who lost all their lives at any point during the journey. A quarter actually gives you a few lives and a health bar of decent size but this doesn’t trivialize your opposition at all thanks to their numbers and attacking methods requiring active movement and smart attack approaches to avoid getting hurt.

The quest to save Maggie takes place across eight major levels, things beginning in the city of Springfield and soon taking off to stranger locations. The theme park and dream world are definitely the most out there, some like the Springfield Butte tame by comparison despite featuring Bigfoot as an enemy, but progression moves along at a good clip and the backgrounds are filled with interesting sights and fun references to the fledgling show that wasn’t quite yet the pop culture icon it is today. Throwable items often match the area theme, levels might have unique hazards like a woman throwing open a door if you step too close, offer different elevations to help with splitting up enemy groups, and on occasion, a level might even feature a minigame. The button-mashing minigames aren’t too substantial and really are just about pressing the two buttons as fast as you can, this mainly meant to be some brief competition in a mostly cooperative game although enemies will fill any slots in the four player game if you don’t have the full family fighting.

The bosses are a surprisingly good bunch, almost all of them asking for a lot more thought on when to strike than the already well designed enemies. Even when fighting the most underwhelming one, a regular bear, it stands beside a mountain where you need to avoid the falling rocks as you battle, the bear packs a roll that can plow through anyone in its path, and he can be knocked down to prevent him from attacking. The goons outside Moe’s Tavern have their own team attacks to hassle you with, a drunk inside of it has a fire breath attack that can instantly kill but has such a clear windup that you should dodge it well enough, and when you face foes like the bowling ball in dreamland or Mr. Burns at the end, they have multiple phases where their attack style keeps shifting up based on how much damage they’ve sustained. Clear tells, unique attacks, and high danger make these battles exciting but manageable, and as they start flashing red more and more frequently to represent how close to dying they are, you can already taste that satisfying victory that’s almost within your grasp. Your attacks may not be much when viewed independently, but when combined with bosses and baddies who are incredibly satisfying to smack around, the lack of attack complexity can nearly be forgotten.

THE VERDICT: While it may not adapt the wonderful wit of the animated sitcom, The Simpsons’s arcade game is gloriously wacky and a blast to play while still providing fun and wonderfully reinterpreted references to the T.V. show. While your own skills are very simple, they are helped along by team attacks and items. Most importantly though, the opposition puts up such a good fight and comes in so many forms that the brawling doesn’t get boring, the bosses asking for smart action and the regular foes adding twists to their attacks to keep the game from just being a button-mashing fest. A player who wants to keep their quarters will find the foes plenty challenging but fair, this arcade brawler asking for the right amount of skill while still not being so strategy focused that it would lose people who are fans of brainless brawling fun or the silly Simpsons show.

And so, I give The Simpsons for arcade machines…

A GREAT rating. While limited protagonists can sometimes drag down the enjoyment of a beat ’em up, this action brawler puts interesting enemies to the forefront and makes your simple skills the tool to overcoming your enemies’ unique attacks. You aren’t just hammering away at the same buttons thanks to the tiny extras given to the Simpsons family, but it is the bosses who move in interesting ways, the regular goons who start picking up new attacking methods, and the strange foes you face at the carnival and in dreamland who ask you to learn a new threat fast that keep the experience fresh and interesting. The barely present minigames are weird breaks but not bothersome, especially since the levels already pack interesting gimmicks that don’t need to be broken away from to try and keep the game’s forward progress entertaining. Enjoyable with a group but still great on your own thanks to the fact it’s what you’re facing that makes things fun rather than how you might be working together, The Simpsons is some of Konami’s finest work when it comes to their arcade beat ’em ups.

Not only is The Simpsons often brought up in talks of excellent brawlers, but it’s even sometimes given the title of the best game based on a T.V. show period. While I won’t make any similar claims since I do intend to play all its competition eventually, The Simpsons has certainly shown it’s in the running by capturing the appeal of the beat ’em up genre well and carrying over many fun references to the show’s first season. It’s little surprise its one of the busiest cabinets I’ve seen when I find it in an arcade, but it is possible to oversell the enjoyable simplicity of its action. Konami did an excellent job with this young franchise, reaching a high level of quality that it probably wouldn’t be able to break past unless it started incorporating more complex mechanics or fights. To keep it a great game for any arcade wanderer to approach and play, it instead kept things accessible without being empty of the challenge a beat ’em up fan would look for, earning it a spot in the genre’s history by landing on the right side of the line that separates bland and repetitive brawlers from those that are satisfyingly simple.