And what is that pellet reward after all that work? Why, another stupid card, of course. Why do they become tiresome? Because the player must collect over one hundred of the little suckers before she is rewarded with her lab rat pellet.

These cards can be found in fixed locations around the game that are entertaining at first but quickly become tiresome. The game does have a minor goal of collecting a monumentally huge number of cards. And the player must enter these areas over and over and over. What jokes there are repeat each time you enter the same place. There is no real cohesive story, despite all the funny stories and sparkling written dialogue in the series proper. There is an arcade gallery with some game takeoffs that can be played, and this area probably has more gameplay than any other location in the game. Gameplay is from a first-person perspective with some character interaction. The interactions with characters from the series are limited to some short animations and sight gags. I guess the premise is that the player should be thrilled to move around the streets of the city under his own steam after spending years staring at it via his living room television. But Virtual Springfield is no-good twiddleware. There are more than a couple of titles to which I have given excellent scores that require nothing more than clicking though some entertaining graphics and stories. Which takes Virtual Springfield out of the realm of “game” and puts it squarely in the category of twiddleware.

Anyone who has played any kind of game with any regularity will find himself clicking wildly on the picture on the screen looking for “the rest of it.” Well, there isn’t any. In most locations, there are some things that can be done, but these are pretty minor actions. The game is mostly a virtual walkabout of the locations from the Fox series. It’s not that the game cannot be played on its own termsit’s just that there are quite a few years’ worth of inside jokes that would leave one out in the cold if she hasn’t got several hundred hours of mainstream nighttime animation under her belt. The Simpsons: Virtual Springfield is a game made to pay homage to the series, and players likely will enjoy it best if they’ve enjoyed the series first.

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