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The Simpsons Skateboarding is a skateboarding video game developed by The Code Monkeys and published by Electronic Arts in November 2002 for the PlayStation 2. Another one of several video games based on the American animated sitcom The Simpsons, players act as various characters, including the titular family, competing in an Annual Skate Tour that has come to Springfield, the reward being 99 Mega-bucks. Each of the game's 10 levels involve learning new moves and pulling them off to complete various objectives on a location in the town.

Upon its release, The Simpsons Skateboarding was critically panned, some reviewers appalled by the lack of redeeming qualities and overwhelming amount of problems, and recommending fans of skateboarding and The Simpsons to stay away. The controls, level design, challenges, graphics, music, and voice clips were targeted, various bugs, glitches and excessive loading times also reported.

Gameplay

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The Simpsons Skateboarding is a skateboarding video game where the player, as various characters from The Simpsons, skates and pulls off various tricks through rinks based around locations in Springfield, such as Springfield Elementary, Itchy & Scratchy Land, the Springfield Gorge, and the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant (GSpot rev). The characters are competing in an Annual Skate Tour that has come to the town, the reward being 99 Mega-bucks (GameZone rev). Each of the game's ten levels follows an order of the three same modes: Skillz School, which teaches six new lessons about moves; Skatefest, roaming around the stage to complete a series of objectives; and Timed Trick Contest, a competition to score a certain amount of points under a time limit (GSpot rev, GameZone rev). The objectives to complete in Skateboard are three high-score objectives, collecting items such as donuts, collecting letters to spell out words like "skinner" and "squishee", and the destruction of objects like Jebediah Springfield's statue (GSpot rev).

Playable characters accessible from the beginning are members of the titular family, such as Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart, and Maggie. Other characters, such as Nelson Muntz, Krusty the Clown, and Otto Mann, are unlocked from completion of a Timed Trick Contest (GSpot rev, IGN rev). They can pull off moves including kickflips, crooked grinds, aerial tail grabs, shove-its, ollies, inverts, manuals and other special tricks (GSpot rev, GameZone rev, IGN rev). However, they have differing attributes. For example, Homer is better than Bart at making sharp turns, but is inferior when it comes to speed (GameZone rev). The attributes can be improved by going to a shop, which requires purchasing with cash collected from completing lessons in Skillz School or objectives in Skatefest (GSpot rev, GameZone rev).

Reception

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The Simpsons Skateboarding garnered abysmal reviews from professional critics, who generally already disliked most of the prior track record with Simpsons video games, such as Bart's Nightmare and The Simpsons Wrestling (4Players, GSpot rev, Maxim review). At the review aggregator Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from publications, it holds a score of 38 based on 21 reviews, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews," as of January 2023.[1] Upon release, some reviews labeled The Simpsons Skateboarding one of the worst games of 2002, one of the worst PlayStation 2 games, and the worst all-time Simpsons video game.[20][6][8] Some critics described it as devoid of redeeming qualities and shocking in its amount of failed aspects.[5][6][8][10] Some complained the game felt like a product conceived by marketing executives.[11][5][10] Most reviewers recommended The Simpsons fans and skateboarding enthusiasts to avoid the game, Hyper's Cam Shea labeling it an "insult" to all types of gamers and GameSpot's Ryan Davis and Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine's Joe Rybicki assuming it would only appeal to hardcore fans of The Simpsons.[a]

The controls were widely condemned as unresponsive and complicated, and the handling poor.[b] The jumping was summarized as "completely inaccurate" and containing "the buoyancy of Homer after a big box of glazed doughnuts."[20][4] Davis found the skateboard handling too wide, slow and difficult to halt. He wrote that when rotating during a trick, "either the timing is incredibly specific or this mechanic is just broken, because half the time the skaters simply ignore the spin command."[7] He also brought up the difficulty disparity between pulling tricks and grinding, where staying in center without moving left or right was all the player had to do.[7] Rybicki was aggravated by not being able to turn while the player's speed rises, as well as it being "far too easy to undershoot or overshoot your target when jumping".[15] Nick Valentino, writing for GameZone, argued the controls should have been an elementary version of the Tony Hawk games, reporting it to be a struggle to perform even basic moves and overcoming hurdles "even with enough speed."[9] AllGame reviewer Scott Alan Marriott also noted the cumbersomeness of performing basic moves, attributing it to the high amount of button presses and D-Pad movements required.[3] Kevin Murphy of GameSpy denounced the decision to have the D-Pad increase the speed of the character (instead of X as in other games), and holding X while pressing R1 or L1 to spin and perform flips (instead of pressing left and right on the D-Pad).[8] The absence of an animation to indicate the amount of wind on a flip was also criticized by him.[8] However, X-Play writer Glenn Rubenstein suggested the "rhythm and timing of the game's controls is fairly consistent" once the player accommodates into it, which may take a few hours due to lack of a "twitch-factor found in other extreme sports titles".[16]

Inconsistencies were noted in the physics. For example, Murphy found the increase in speed when pressing the accelerate button too little, and noted the height of a flip was lowered by not doing a trick beforehand.[8] EGM rev3 cited a half-pipe with the two sides executing different flip heights.[4] David Smith, a critic for IGN, also discussed issues with ollies, such as its height on a flip being dependent on the distance from the flip (made worse by a camera that makes it difficult to judge); on flat ground, he documented continuously bailing on attempted ollies even when Bart's jump stat was extremely high.[11] Rubenstein and 4Players critic Paul Kautz noted unruliness in collision detection, such as successfully landing on the ground after randomly pushing buttons or grinding when clearly not near the surface to.[2][16] The camera was also panned for causing quick zoom-ins and perspective changes during air tricks, which made spotting and collecting objects harder.[3][8][13]

Reviewers frequently criticized the level design. Some reviewers disliked the simplicity, while Rybicki called the game "a mess of irrelevant clutter."[7][13][14][15] A common criticism was the little number of opportunities to pull off combos, which was attributed to the skateboarding lines, particularly their rudimentary design and low quantity.[5][8][11] EGM rev1 argued the stages had much more edges to grind on than areas to perform vertical tricks; this combined with the small points gained for performing vertical stunts meant the player would be grinding for most of the experience, a disappointed sentiment shared by EGM rev2.[4] The challenges, especially those that require spelling words, were also dismissed for being mundane and ludicrous, not helped by the inclusion of a time limit.[4][5][15][12] A critic who enjoyed them was Valentino, who praised them as "tricky events".[9] Dave Halverson, in a review for the American magazine Play, also appreciated being able to continuing skating after the time limit runs out.[19] The level themes were praised for reflecting the show and sometimes being obscure references that would appeal to Simpsons fans, such as the Springfield Gorge, the Stonecutters headquarters, and Itchy and Scratchy Land.[3][4][15][16]

Apart from Play Magazine (ES), who complimented the graphics' faithfulness to the source material, the visuals were poorly-received. The environments garnered negative comments for their perceived plain textures, angular modeling, and low amount of polygons.[c] While reviewers like Marriott and smith acknowledged the flat style may reflect that of the TV show, they still criticized it.[3][11] Smith argued the aliasing and sharp edges did not reflect the show's "smooth, round-edged" look.[11] Davis noticed the buildings had four sides and the trees six, while Valentino and Smith noted how "boxy" the cars and half-pipes appeared.[7][11] Davis thought the textures ranged from "passable to downright awful, exhibiting lots of blur and occasionally some really nasty color banding", while Smith noted the non-existence of lightning contributed to the flatness.[7][11] Marriott also felt the levels lacked pedestrians.[3]

The most well-received aspect of the graphics were the character models, which were generally described as decent and reflective of the original characters.[2][9][11][13] However, even they received scrutiny, OPMUS describing them at "lumpy and odd", and GSpot analyzing their proportions to be off and joints between body parts visible.[15][7] The animations were also poorly-received by 4Players and GameSpy, joking that "all of the characters perform grab tricks like robots".[2][8] Even a favorable critic towards the visuals, X-Play, who found them "sharp and clean", suggested the trick animations looked too similar.[16] Some reviewers were also dismayed with the absence of cel shading; Cinescape and GameSpy suggested it looked less faithful to the TV series than if it had cel-shading, and AllGame reasoned cel-shading could have made the game look like Jet Set Radio (2000).[20][8][15]

The voice clips were noted for their incorporation of the original voice actors, but the repetitive usage of them was widely condemned.[2][3][5][9][13] The repetitive clip problem was noted with the bystanders, such as Apu, Barney Gumble, and Ralph Wiggum and the playable skateboarders.[3][5][7] GameSpy complained, "If you can go more than five seconds without hearing some stupid comment, you're really lucky. Kent Brockman and your character practically hold entire conversations as long as you're playing."[8] 4Players wrote that different snippets were played randomly regardless of their suitability to the situation.[2] The phrases, such as "my butt hurts", were criticized by some reviewers as unfunny, annoying, and by GameZone as "often strange."[d] Cinescape dismissed the sound bites as simply low-quality recordings of episodes from the original series. Reviewers were particularly annoyed by Kent Brockman's announcement of every trick the players pull off.[2][4][7][10] His commentary was called by GI "the worst announcing to date", and an EGM reviewer (EGM rev2) creepy.[4][6] Even X-Play, who enjoyed some of the voice clips, particularly Ralph Wiggum's, argued they got "annoying rather fast".[16]

The dependence on voice clips was also cited as an example of the game's lack of humor and poor incorporation of the license, criticizing their non-existence in the challenges.[9][11] As AllGame recommended, "Why not make an obstacle-laden gauntlet for Bart to navigate on his way home before Homer barrels into the garage with his car? How about spray painting graffiti over the town of Springfield, harassing citizens with a slingshot, or playing practical jokes on Skinner or Moe?"[3] Both Cinescape and OPMUS described it as inferior to Road Rage in this respect, Cinescape calling the comedy "an afterthought, and doesn’t seem to make much sense in the game".[20][15] Maxim was turned off by the concept of a Simpsons skateboarding game on arrival, opining that it was "half-amusing to see Marge do a 360 with her beehive do for, oh, about 10 seconds" and "we don’t need to see the whole damn town of Springfield doing Ollies in a nuclear plant."[18]

The soundtrack was dismissed as "lousy," "uninspiring," "generic," and "a whimsical non-event of a soundtrack," its incorporation of Danny Elfman's theme particularly deried as "blasé" and "mutated."[e] Eurogamer described the music as a set of "dodgy pieces of synthetic Ska crap which sound like they were hashed together in five minutes with Dance eJay."[5] AllGame and GameZone reported the music irritating them, GameZone to the point of muting the television.[3][9] Mostly categorized as Ska, the music was generally considered unsuitable for a Simpsons property.[5][8][11][15] One supporter of the soundtrack was 4Players, who highlighted its remixes of the show's them.[2] IGN also wrote that the use of Elfman's melody was "fun now and again, but that also reminds you how this could have sounded a lot better."[11]

Some journalists reported bugs and glitches, such as pop-up, lock-ups during gameplay, and going through and getting stuck in collision.[3][13] GI wondered whether The Simpsons Skateboarding was released in an early alpha stage or if the testing staff went on strike.[6] Load times were described as excessive, long, and inexcusable given the little detail in the models and textures.[2][3][11] Cited examples include a loading screen for a loading screen, requiring checking of the memory card twice before entering a saved level, and loading between tasks within a tutorial level.[8][11][10] Reviews had conflicting coverage on the framerate; GameZone and Play (US) claimed it was smooth and "dips just a smidgeon now and then," while others called it inconsistent, "vicious and sporadic," and having "occasional slowdown."[9][19][7][16]

Positive reviewers were the minority, and included Play (US) who called it the best Simpsons video game, and X-Play who concluded it was better than most video game adaptations of media properties.[17][19][16] Both X-Play and EGM rev1 summarized it had enough content, such as segments of skating around Springfield and the voice bits, for fans of the animated sitcom.[4][16] Joypad and Play Magazine (ES) suggested it may entertain young players, although Play Magazine (ES) and X-Play noted it may be too easy for gamers experienced with skateboarding video games like Tony Hawk.[12]

In 2015, HobbyConsolas ranked The Simpsons Skateboarding as the 12th-best all-time video game based on The Simpsons, Álvaro Alonso writing the game's only problem was the inability to play as Tony Hawk.[21]

References

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  1. ^ a b "The Simpsons Skateboarding for PlayStation 2 Reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Kautz, Paul (26 January 2003). "Test: The Simpsons: Skateboarding (Sport)". 4Players (in German). Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Marriott, Scott Alan. "The Simpsons Skateboarding - Review". AllGame. Archived from the original on 14 November 2014. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i EGM staff (January 2003). "The Simpsons Skateboarding". Electronic Gaming Monthly. No. 162. p. 176. Archived from the original on 14 May 2004. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Taylor, Martin (1 January 2003). "[The] Simpsons Skateboarding". Eurogamer. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  6. ^ a b c d e f Reiner, Andrew (December 2002). "Simpsons' [sic] Skateboarding". Game Informer. No. 116. p. 123. Archived from the original on 12 January 2008. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Davis, Ryan (26 November 2002). "The Simpsons Skateboarding Review". GameSpot. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Murphy, Kevin (2 December 2002). "GameSpy: The Simpsons Skateboarding". GameSpy. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  9. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Valentino, Nick (24 November 2002). "The Simpsons Skateboarding - PS2 - Review". GameZone. Archived from the original on 8 December 2008. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  10. ^ a b c d e f g Shea, Cam (February 2003). "The Simpsons Skateboarding". No. 112. p. 81. Retrieved 26 January 2023. {{cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= (help)
  11. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s Smith, David (19 November 2002). "[The] Simpsons Skateboarding". IGN. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  12. ^ a b c Kerine (2003). "The Simpsons Skateboarding". Joypad (in French). No. 127. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  13. ^ a b c d e f g h i Pilou (13 January 2003). "The Simpsons Skateboarding". Jeuxvideo.com (in French). Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  14. ^ a b c Evans, Dean (April 2003). "The Simpsons Skateboarding". PlayStation 2 Official Magazine – Australia. No. 13. p. 72. Retrieved 28 January 2023.
  15. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Rybicki, Joe (January 2003). "The Simpsons Skateboarding". Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine. p. 132. Archived from the original on 29 March 2004. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  16. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Rubenstein, Glenn (25 November 2002). "'[The] Simpsons Skateboarding' (PS2) Review". X-Play. Archived from the original on 25 November 2002. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  17. ^ a b Theobald, Phil (January 2003). "The Simpsons Skateboarding". GameNOW. No. 15. p. 52. Retrieved 28 January 2023.
  18. ^ a b Boyce, Ryan (25 October 2002). "[The] Simpsons Skateboarding". Maxim. Archived from the original on 24 November 2002. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  19. ^ a b c d Halverson, Dave (December 2002). "The Simpsons Skateboarding". Play. No. 12. p. 84. Retrieved 26 January 2023.
  20. ^ a b c d e Cite error: The named reference Cinescape was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  21. ^ Alonso, Álvaro (25 February 2015). "Los mejores juegos de Los Simpson para PC y todas las consolas". HobbyConsolas (in Spanish). Retrieved 28 January 2023.


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