Simpsons Wrestling (PS)

Expect Simpsons Wrestling to offer fierce competition for the console wrestling game crown and you¹re going to be in for a disappointment. If you're in the market for a fun, throwaway piece of arcade entertainment, however, this could be just your bag.

Boasting the involvement of 19 characters from the TV series, complete with accompanying sampled sounds and venues lifted from the show, the aim is to take control of a character and battle to be the Springfield Champion. Each character comes with their own taunts and moves (for instance, Barney attacks with a beer pot, while Homer will strike you down with his bowling ball), and although the game perhaps too often descends into a melee of random button hammering, it's fun trying out the different characters (some of which are locked at the start). Each bout is also enlivened by the various power-ups that appear throughout the ring (which serve up extra fighting options), and the taunt mode, which gives you a brief period of invulnerability.

Simpsons Wrestling never has any pretensions about being more than an enjoyable little fighter. That's fortunate, because it's no threat to the current fighting game champions. Yet while this is best described as short-lived entertainment, it's still certainly fun while it lasts. --Simon Brew

This is not wrestling; it's hardly even a game. The sound bites are from the real talent, which is one good thing--the only good thing, in fact. The rest is a button mashing horror, an exercise in frustration made all the worse by just how much we would like to be enjoying ourselves. The Simpsons Wrestling is the worst kind of licensed rubbish, a generic fighting game that uses popular characters but doesn't pay attention to their personalities. Seeing Marge clobbering people and using Maggie as a special weapon is lame. Lisa in a fight is even dumber. Even the characters that might be prone to such violence, such as Groundskeeper Willie and Homer, are incredibly lame, since they have less than a half-dozen moves each. In sum, worst use of a license ever. If for some reason you're not interested in the game because you're a fan of The Simpsons but because you want some crazy arcade fighting action, well, don't bother. The gameplay is the only thing that could be worse than the license use, and that's saying a great deal. There are a dozen characters to choose from and 10 different locales. Each character has a basic attack, a special attack that must be charged up and a grapple. None of them are any fun. Not even for a minute. The graphics are terrible, with low-res characters, abominable collision detection and static backgrounds. The backgrounds are equally low-res and blurry, even though they're 2D and don't move at all. How hard would it have been to just import art from the show? There is no battle royal or any extra fun modes at all. This isn't actually wrestling, remember, so it's all about one-on-one action. Here's how the game works: Each character appears in a corner of the ring and spouts a catch phrase. Then the action begins. Then, less than five seconds later, a disillusioned Simpsons fan turns off the PlayStation in disgust. Repeat ad nauseam. --DailyRadar.com -- DailyRadar.com