On Two Cartoon Tie-In Video Games
What you're looking for this morning -- My thoughts on The Simpsons: Road Rage and Dexter's Laboratory: Robot Rampage
Before we begin: I made a video on two Japanese Game Boy soccer games!
One of the nice things about the Substack page is that I’m able to stay on the pulse of what my readers want to see from me on any given — and today, this first November Wednesday morning of an even-numbered year, I sense that you all clamor for a piece comparing two 20+ year-old video games based on TV cartoons. I shall give it to you.
I have been playing two video games on-and-off over the past few weeks: The Simpsons: Road Rage, developed by Radical Entertainment and published by Electronic Arts for the Nintendo GameCube in 2001, and Dexter’s Laboratory: Robot Rampage, developed by Taito and published by BAM! in 2000 for the Game Boy Color.
Both of these games drew me in by offering the same thing: A method of experiencing more of one of my favorite game series years after they both went defunct. Road Rage is a clone of Crazy Taxi featuring the cast of the Simpsons and Robot Rampage could basically be considered a more-or-less official entry in the Elevator Action series featuring the characters of Dexter’s Laboratory, considering that it was developed by the series’ original creators. We haven’t had a new Crazy Taxi since a PSP game in 2007 and we haven’t had a new Elevator Action since a PS3 download-only release in 2011 that I only just within the last hour learned about on MobyGames. I have not really tapped both of these wells dry (I’ve never played Crazy Taxi 2, for example, though everything in that game is present in the third, which I’ve played extensively), but these were the courses of action I took to experience just a taste more of them.
Taken at its components, Road Rage should be one of the games that holds an irrationally strong place in my heart, one of those that I've defended through gritted teeth in webforum posts for an embarrassingly long period of time now, one of those that people know not to disparage in front of me lest they set me off on a rant they've heard many times before. It doesn't, though. I've never really given it more than a few generally positive passing thoughts in my life. I only thought to dig it out recently because a friend brought up the spiritual successor, Hit and Run, which I never played but understand to be very well-liked.
I first encountered Road Rage at the age of about seven, I think in the summer of 2002. It was one of a few games that my father purchased to play himself, but that I sort of took over through time and attrition. This collection also included Star Wars: Rogue Squadron for the N64, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine for the XBOX 360, and each of the NCAA Football games released from 2003-2005. It was rated T for Teen, too, and some of the characters dropped TV-14 appropriate swear words, and I recall that my mother wasn't overjoyed whenever I was playing it (or at least that I started saying "I'm Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?"). This background should have left the game not only tinged with joyous halcyonic youthful nostalgic, but with the tangy edge of pre-adolescent pseudo-rebellion, perhaps mirroring that of the rapscallious older son?1
Along with that mid-childhood nostalgia, Road Rage's entire makeup calls back indirectly to an affect-laden time in my life -- the autumn of 2011, when I was about 16, and a junior in high school. I would routinely get home from school around 3:45, play Crazy Taxi until dinner, do my homework, then watch DVDs of The Simpsons pilfered from my dad's credenza until I went to bed. This was an era of adolescent stumbling, the fall in which I realized that I was not just inherently uber-intelligent and charismatic, when my grades slipped and I found myself socially inept and awkward in a way that I'd never been before. It was during this time of great internal change that both Crazy Taxi and The Simpsons took on the sort of life-raft status that art tends to shoulder (This is also when I started listening to Los Campesinos and Asobi Seksu and watching the Minnesota Vikings, if that indicates anything). Yet, there was this video game I had in my possession that combined two things that I was more appreciative of, even grateful for, than merely a fan of... and I never seriously touched it back then.
I don't know why I didn't at least have that moment of lucidity to dig into it. I don't think it would've made any seismic change to my psyche or person if it had found me in that moment, but I'm surprised that I never thought about it. 2Regardless, I started playing it a bit in my downtime last week, and I've really been enjoying it.
I've been surprised by how much more robust it is compared to any home console port of Crazy Taxi. How often does that ever happen in gaming, for a clone to outwork the original article? It doesn't control nearly as well, and the collision detection can be a bit spotty, and if I had to choose to play one for thirty minutes, I'd still pick Crazy Taxi, but my goodness is there a lot packed into Road Rage. It really makes the most of The Simpsons license, too; I appreciate this more having mainlined the series for much of my adolescence and young adulthood than I ever could've as a child before I saw the show. You hit so many places taken from the show, some from individual episodes, even (Rancho Relaxo, the box factory, the Legitimate Businessman's Club). Every character is voiced by their real voice actor, some of the lines are pretty good, though they all grate after the fifteenth repeat or so. The developers took this difficult task of turning Springfield into a real, traversable place, and they made it work very well!
I have very few favorite media works that had any video game adaptations of any kind. My favorite TV genre has always been sketch comedy, and though I admit I haven't tried the Homey D. Clown point-and-click adventure, those aren't really fodder for a traditional video game. My favorite films are all either comedies or pretentious snob stuff or documentaries, few of which make for good games. As such, I've never really tried to scratch the itch that I recognize from the Star Wars and Harry Potter fans, where they approach tie-in games with the expectation that they'll feel like they're existing in that fictional world to a satisfactory degree. Road Rage does it well enough for Springfield! It scratches an itch that I didn't even know I had.
I would've never touched Robot Rampage (I just noticed that the two subtitles of these two games are both double-R constructions.) if I hadn't learned that it was basically an Elevator Action game. I have some fondness for Dexter's Laboratory, I know I watched it as a kid, but I couldn't tell you the plot of any episodes. There is no extra joy laden in being able to finally control Dexter from Dexter's Laboratory like I feel from driving around Springfield. If this were any other property skinned onto Elevator Action, I would feel the same way about it. If this were Barbie's Dream House Hijinks (I'm picturing that an army of cloned Skippers and cats come out of the doors and toss pieces of cereal at her and Barbie has to subdue them with a spray bottle of water) or The Office: Dunder Mifflin Madness (I'm picturing that an army of Dwight Schrutes and Michael Scotts come out of the doors and try to hand CPS reports to Jim, who has to subdue them with paperclips and staples) or American Psycho: Office Operation (This one you can probably picture yourself), I would've bought it just the same.
I love Elevator Action. I grew up with the Game Boy port, another game that once belonged to my father, this one actually directly given to me as a gift. Unfortunately, that cartridge has succumbed to deterioration and no longer works in any Game Boy in which I've tried it. I'm more partial to Elevator Action Returns, a Japan-only Sega Saturn port, but I will take more portable Elevator Action wherever I can get it. I've learned little and have gained no greater affection for Dexter's Laboratory through this game, but it's served its purpose otherwise.
This is an odd aspect of the necessary intersection of video games and other media works, partially reflective of the subjugated status that games had for so much of the history of the medium, where some of them basically served as marketing materials for films or television shows in the same way that high-sugar breakfast cereals and Pogs did. How strange is it, for example, that one of the most significant entries in the First-Person Shooter genre was created to sell audiences on a thoroughly forgettable James Bond film? There are die-hard fans of Goldeneye 007 for the N64 who have zero affinity for its movie. Arguably, Goldeneye the video game has outlived the film in the public consciousness. That has certainly been the fate of The Chronicles of Riddick, and I'm sure there are others.
I'm especially cognizant of when the marketing material exists in an otherwise underserved genre, thus bringing its fans face-to-face with media works they would've otherwise never touched. I have been, as a fan of the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater style of freestyle action sports platformer game, recommended both the tie-in game for Turbo, a 2013 Dreamworks-produced film about Snails, and Crayola Scoot, a game intended to bolster the sales of 12, 24, 48, and 64-count boxes of wax crayons. This is the unsung cross beared by the genre-attentive gamer. I don't know any other Elevator Action fans, and I'm not joining a Discord if there is one, but if all that we must resort to as a unit is playing a Dexter's Laboratory game, then so be it. Fans of Dexter's Laboratory at the very least got a better end of the deal when it comes to Game Boy tie-ins than Simpsons fans did, for what it's worth.
No. I have never felt a kinship with Bart. I have felt a kinship with Martin Prince, Milhouse, Moe Syszlak, and Groundskeeper Willie, but ne’er Bart. MAYBE Lisa.
I think sometimes about the media works I dodged as a teenager that would've had absolutely thunderous effects on me if I had found them during that time -- i.e. I think something goes differently about my development if I'd ended up with a CD copy of Something to Write Home About by the Get Up Kids at ~15. I don't know how to define it, but if that's the afterlife, like if I get to pick and choose a few specific things about my life and re-do it that way, I want to see the effect that possessing a phenomenal emo album like that created by guys from my hometown as a moody kid would've had on me.