Wow, get a load of this AV Club review: “blunt, dumb, ridiculous, and almost never funny.” We totally didn’t play the same game. Sure, it could be a whole lot better; its shoddy camera nearly wrecked the thing for me. And I’ll admit that the first few levels are probably the weakest. That Lard Lad level is a little too early in the game, and a little too close to the intersection of hard and tedious. But later levels more than make up for it. The Overlord-style controls for Marge (who uses a megaphone to recruit angry mob members) were a great change-up, and who can argue with the boss fights towards the end: Matt Groening, Shakespeare, and God?

It’s the writing you’ll really play for, though. I can’t agree that it’s “never funny”. Hell, I haven’t watched the Simpsons in ages, and whenever I get into one of those “it used to be good” conversations, my definition of the canonical seasons is drastically narrower than anyone else’s (I like 3 to 6 and that’s about it). Yet, to me, the following lines are up there with the best:

• Bart, to Shakespeare: “If it weren’t for the vanity of actors, your work would be long forgotten.”
• over the PA system in heaven: “Satan may appear in the steam room.”

The latter made me laugh out loud and thereby miss the platform I was trying to jump to.

But there is no god but gameplay, and no matter how good the writing, it’s hard to recommend this title over those which are actually a lot more fun to play, like a lot of the A-list titles currently flooding every platform. So wait for it until you can get it cheap, or rent it, and when you’re done with the big names sometime in february, check this one out.