Crapshoot: Virtual Springfield is a reminder of when The Simpsons was good

From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random obscure games back into the light. This week, they'll never stop The Simpsons - but in the mid-90s, oh, how they should have tried to stop the games. With the possible exception of one...

It is written that once in every generation, buried in a mountain of terrible, terrible licensed games, there will be... well, a diamond is pushing it. An emerald, perhaps? A topaz, potentially. More than just another bit of licensed crapola anyway. Meet a game that looked at the technology available to it back in 1997 and thought "You know what? I could actually do something pretty cool with this."

The Simpsons games. However many you think there were, oh, I pretty much guarantee there were more. Very few of them made it to PC thankfully, but console gamers in the '90s faced an all-out minefield of abominations with Bart Simpson's face on them—a result of them mostly coming from the show's early years, before everyone realised that Homer was actually the main character. 

Konami's Arcade Game remains one of the most fondly remembered, in all its surreal glory. Bart vs. The Space Mutants was pretty damn bad, but at least in an interesting way. It was unique, at least.

After that... oh boy. A torrent of stuff with names like Krusty's Fun House, and horrible minigame collections like Virtual Bart and Bart's Nightmare, and completely forgotten stuff like Escape From Camp Deadly, not to mention stuff where clearly nobody involved was even slightly interested. Bart and the Beanstalk, anybody? Science has objectively proven that this game had no excuse to exist.

The PC wasn't spared all of these, sadly, though it did dodge most of the bullets. Instead, in the height of the 'hey, we can put lots of crap on a CD' multimedia age, it got Virtual Springfield—one of the least-remembered Simpsons games, but still one of the best attempts at bringing The Simpsons to videogames.

Well, up to a point. Really, there's not a lot of 'game' here. Some, not much. The basic goal is to collect about 70 cards all over town. What actually made it cool? Actually wandering all over town.

For fans of the show, this was awesome. There's never been a 'proper' map of Springfield, of course. It's a town built on negative continuity, even before it was moved down the road on trailers after burying itself in garbage. Virtual Springfield offered one though, with Myst-style exploration of its streets, adventure game interiors, and some of the worst mini-games ever created by man or beast alike—but mini-games starring The Simpsons, so still pretty cool for about five minutes or so. That might not sound like much, but it's about five minutes more than most other attempts out there.

(Not to mention a full half an hour longer than Dilbert's Desktop Games.)

It works because it actually feels vaguely alive. You don't have freedom of movement, and can only go into a few of the buildings you see—the obvious ones like the Simpsons House, Nuclear Plant, Krusty Studios and Moe's Tavern—but you can wander around the streets and characters are constantly driving past, popping in for a line, or doing something in the background. At least, to the levels that pre-rendered graphics can do. Their animation quality is beyond terrible, but at least the voice actors showed up to record new lines instead of just relying on dialogue ripped from old episodes.

It's the attention to detail that makes it fun to explore. Go into the Kwiki-Mart, and the background tune is a Muzak version of Baby On Board—the barbershop song that made Homer and co world-famous for roughly the seventh time in the show's run. Open the freezer at the back and the secret passage is there to visit Apu's rooftop garden. On the magazine rack are 13parody covers, including Queen Victoria's Secret ("What's under that dress? Another dress!"), Obnoxious Co-Worker Magazine, and The Bison Enthusiast. 

It's not exactly a case of every pixel hiding a joke, but there are more of them in about three of Virtual Springfield's screens than many other entire comedy games.

Things do get a teeny-tiny bit creepy when you go to the Simpsons House though. It's nothing overt, just the realisation that you're not really a guest of the family or anything, silently going from room to room and prying through their things in a methodical kind of way that brings to mind... oh... Dexter Morgan investigating a potential kill. Just look at Marge here. She's clearly terrified of the lunatic.

That sensation gets worse when you head upstairs, standing silently as Lisa phones the Corey hotline and delivers a lengthy "UURRRRRRRRH" of satisfaction, or glances over to say, "I don't know whether I feel elation or shame at your obvious need to dig deeper into my inner being..." or realise that Snake the convict is in the bathroom. A fellow inmate on the lam? Who knows? Only The Shadow.

If you need to pee yourself, doing it in front of your PC is a spectacularly bad idea. Seriously. Electricity. You fool. To see a Simpsons-approved bathroom though, you have no choice but to head for Homer and Marge's en-suite instead, where on the toilet you'll find... oh my...

...

No, wait, it's okay. Turns out it's just magazines like:

Well, with the exception of...

Even with animation this primitive, Virtual Springfield only manages to squeeze so much onto its disc. It doesn't take long to wear out what it offers, see all the jokes, and start craving an era where open worlds would allow more than just murdering people in the street but in fact wouldn't end up bothering. If you actually bought it over a real game, you'd be disappointed. 

Unless that game was Riven.

For what it was though, it's a rare example of a multimedia game that deserves to hold its head up for the right reasons, rather than to make its head easier to chop off and throw it into a handy cesspit. It's also a reminder of the days when The Simpsons was actually good. How long ago those days seem, unless of course you're crazy or have less sense of taste than a professional firework swallower.