ZEALOT #10: The Simpsons Gaming Multiverse
With Robbydude and Cate Wurtz
Apologies for this month’s day-late-of-being-in-the-proper-month episode! Holidays, work schedules, and the nightmare of Matt Groening’s media empire all conspired against us. But it’s here!
This month we are joined by Simpsons expert and former ZEAL contributor Cate Wurtz, to explore Springfields past and present, in this tribute to the many, many attempts at tie-in games.
First up, we have the lesser known DOS adventure game Bart’s Nightmare, a confusing, broken, and surprisingly difficult exploration of a bee-infested non-Euclidean space. Will we learn the Secret of the Attic? Will we get to see the rare Blue Shirt Bart? Will we figure out what is a reference and what was invented whole cloth for this tie-in? What we will have, is not fun.
We take a break from having our wills broken to explore the classic beat’em up arcade game, The Simpsons Game! This one continues the thread of trying to build a vision of the people and world of Springfield that would soon diverge wildly from the canon universe. Did you know Marge originally was going to have rabbit ears? Featuring none of your favorite characters and some actually fun gameplay!
And in our final installment, we jump to the near-present with the Simpsons Movie tie-in game, also confusingly titled The Simpsons Game. It has nothing to do with the movie and is a poorly made two-character platformer, but at least the series has its consistent badly written characters down!
Also they’ve just started cramming it with references to other episodes.
And finally, here are some special clips from the scrapped playthrough of The Simpsons Wrestling; the full video was 45 minutes of Robby asking if he can stop playing it as we continued to see if there was any plot, aliens, or fun to be had.
These are the few highlights.
And that does it for this month’s update (last month’s update). For this next month, we’re going to be bringing in special guest (and prior ZEAL contributor) Barroo for our Christmas update! Stay tuned and thanks again for supporting ZEAL!
