Crazy Taxi with a touch of Simpsons

The first Simpsons game on sixth generation consoles, Simpsons Road Rage is a combination of racing with taxi driving. If you’ve played Crazy Taxi before, you will already be familiar with the games concept, but for those who aren’t, the objective here is to pick up passengers and drop them off at their desired location within the time limit, all whilst avoiding traffic obstacles. There are six locations, and over 20 different characters to choose from with slightly different mechanics.

Story of the game is Mr Burns has brought out the local bus company and has filled the buses with radioactive waste, which are wrecking havoc across Springfield (You will see why in the game)
Simpsons basically predicted Uber.

Road Rage

The main mode of the game and the one used to earn money to unlock characters and locations which can be done by dropping passengers off as fast as possible for bonuses. If you fail to get a passenger to their destination on time, you sill get to keep cash accumulated so far.
As soon as you start a game you will have to pick up a passenger by stopping within the blue rings that surround a character, an icon of the destination will appear on the left of the screen, and a hand will appear at the top which will point in the direction where you need to go, along with a point marked on a mini map. The passenger time limit is also displayed.

Reward

Slow: Between 0% and 20% of the timer left, $25 bonus only
Normal: Between 21% and 35%of the timer left, $50 and 1 second added
Fast: More than 36% of the timer left, $100 and 3 seconds added
Safe Driver: Awarded when the bonus randomly appears, you have to avoid and NOT hit traffic three times. If you hit three cars then you lose this bonus. $250 and 5 seconds added
Road Rage: Awarded when the bonus randomly appears, you have to destroy a certain amount of objects before you drop the passenger to their location. $1000 and 10 seconds added

The Safe Driver bonus is triggered when ‘Avoid Traffic For Bonus’ appears when you pick up a passenger, the Road Rage bonus is similar where upon picking up a passenger, you are prompted to destroy a set amount of objects by running your car into it.

When the time runts out, its game over. You will return to the score screen to see how much you have collected, then you are promoted to enter your initials if you have a high score, then the game auto-saves and you can then picked a different character or location.

Be Mindful of

Mr Burns will randomly appear during the game, (you will hear him say ‘Get them Smithers’) who will then try to drive into you to disrupt your driving, but due to the poor AI will either miss you completely, or crash into another car or bus.
The Buses, These wreck havoc around the town, and will leave a trial of destruction in their path such as cards and objects which can be of hindrance since you will have to drive round them to avoid them slowing you down.
Transit Stops, Knocking over these add an additional 2 seconds to your time, and you can hit them on your way to your passengers destination
Obstacles: Some objects like billboards are solid and will cause your car to crash which impacts your speed. Some billboards can be knocked down but others are solid and will cause your car to collide with them.
Physics: The game doesn’t have the best physics engine, and sometimes you car can crash into something that isn’t there due to a faulty hit box detection, or when you drive into the air, your car may land at a weird angle which will take some time for your car to correct. Not something that you want when your trying to beat the time limit. Best thing is to ty and straighten your car as its about to land.

Sunday Drive Mode

The chilled mode, here there’s no time limit or fares. This means you can explore all unlocked locations at your leisure, and find new shortcuts for road rage mode (There are loads) You cannot unlock anything in this mode since you don’t earn any fares.

Mission Mode

A series of 10 missions where you have to complete an objective within the time limit. Most of these missions consist of knocking over X amount of objects within a set time, or just getting a passenger to their destination at a specific time limit. There’s little variety here and you only unlock the special car for Homer when you complete all 10 missions. Also these missions are very short, with the games loading screen taking more time to load than the game-play itself, at least on the PS2 version.

Locations

Evergreen Terrace: The location that contains the iconic Simpsons House, along with the Kwik-E-mart, Springfield Church, Retirement Castle and the Elementary school. This is the only location that’s available at the start of the game.

Entertainment District: Where Moe’s, Duff Brewery, Mini Golf and the Rusty Barnacle are located. Plenty of shortcuts but due to the tall buildings its easy to miss them.

Springfield Dam: The infamous Spring Dam, This locations has no transit stop so you will need a fest vehicle to get the faster times, this is despite having plenty of transit buses? Destinations here are quite far apart, so make use of the shortcuts. You can drive down the damn itself into the water to get to Rancho Relaxo faster. Kamp Krusty, Jittery Joe’s Coffee Shop (From the season 5 episode where Marge and Ruth Powers meet) and the Stonecutters lodge are also here

Nuclear Power-plant: This is an odd location, since half of it is for the Power-plant with the other being for the Springfield Mall. As a result many character locations will be parts of the Plant itself, like the cut off valve or the cooling towers, which makes no sense as to why a character would want a taxi there. At least there’s a baseball stadium that you can drive through, and an Ikea knock off with the Springfield mall.

Downtown: Various familiar locations are here like the Clown College, Androids Dungeon, the Police Station and the Monorail. This location can get a bit busy with a lot of traffic and objects, and there’s plenty of items to destroy when you get Road Rage bonus.

Springfield Mountains: The final location, set in a rural area like the Springfield Dam. Burns Mansion is located here along with Springfield Gorge. A hard level to make any money on since everything is a large distance from their destinations, there are very few short stops.

Versions

The game was released on all three major console platforms (GameCube, PlayStation 2, Xbox, with no native PC port). There’s very little difference between the three, with the Xbox version having the most detailed textures and stable framerate. The PlayStation 2 version is an earlier build and has a few extra passenger locations which were removed since these could be exploited to gain faster time, you could pick up and drop off the passenger, the race back to the same pickup location and since the destination is very short, you could easily make time by exploiting this.