Bart vs. Homersaurus - Playthrough of the LCD handheld simulation by Itizso!
21 Dec 2024
Itizso does it again! Watch as I do battle against the mighty Homersaurus.
Bart vs. My Hopes and Dreams now available on Amazon!
15 Dec 2024
Just in time for the holidays, my book "Bart vs. My Hopes and Dreams: Looking Back at Thirty Years of Video Games Based on The Simpsons" is now available as a paperback and ebook on Amazon! Check it out.
The end of the finger era
11 Nov 2024
I would be remiss if I didn't post an update here about the impending annihilation of the universe.
... the Tapped Out universe, that is.
EA has announced that The Simpsons Tapped Out, which ran for almost thirteen years, is shutting down. They removed it from app stores back on October 31st and the servers will go away on January 24th, 2025. So uh, late news is better than no news? But hey if you're reading this then you probably already downloaded the game at some point, so you can still spend some time burning through your donuts.
I wasn't always positive about the game (grumble grumble exploitative cash grab), but I did play it and do have some fond memories of using a hacked version of the app to cheat all the donuts in the world. Unlike James Coco, I didn't go mad after fifteen minutes. (Maybe twenty.)
Bartman and Cupcake Crisis LCD handheld simulations!
24 May 2023
Itizso continues the good work of bringing back those LCD handhelds we all took for granted decades ago. These Simpsons games and more are available at: https://itizso.itch.io/retrofab.
Emulation heads know that The Simpsons Bowling, an arcade game from 2000, could never be properly played outside of an original arcade machine. The problem is that no emulation app could get it to run with the voice clips intact. So you could play it, but without voice clips it’s missing a major reason to even play through as all these characters.
Jumping to the present, Arcade1Up released an arcade reproduction cabinet with both The Simpsons Arcade and The Simpsons Bowling installed, including all voice clips! Players dug into the code recently and discovered that the game is running on a custom version of DuckStation, an emulator for PlayStation games, because the arcade hardware was apparently based on the original PlayStation. It’s kind of wild. You can see footage here of someone trying to emulate the game with the standard version of DuckStation. As it says in the video description, “As far as i can tell this is THE only version of this game that runs with the sound clips from the announcer and characters unlike MAME which can't even play them back.“
Something that I’ll throw out into the universe is if someone from Disney/Gracie Films wants to have a complete collection of every Simpsons video game ever made for a nice display case in the lobby, I can be persuaded to trade the complete set for tickets to a table read.
That includes not just each game, but every single port of every single game. Amstrad CPC players, eat your heart out.
Matt Selman, writer and executive producer on The Simpsons, and writer on The Simpsons: Road Rage: Wait, Mr. Burns bought up mass transit? That was the plot? I don’t remember any of this. I remember Hit & Run a lot better, but the way this kind of thing normally worked is that they’d come to the writers and say “Do you want some extra money?” Then we’d have to write like, 20 lines of Homer being happy and 20 lines of Homer being sad. I remember there being a joke about Moe landing on his hemorrhoids — that’s the most vibrant memory I have of this game.
