Xboxing

When I packed my Atari 2600 away years ago, I thought it’d be the last gaming system I would own. (Now, I did have an Intellivision, but I wasn’t sure I’d catch as many pop-culture-infused eyes in my opening line if I mentioned it instead of Atari.) Throughout the years, I watched as Colecovision beget the Nintendo Entertainment System beget Sega Genesis beget Nintendo 64 beget Sony PlayStation. I sampled these systems through friends, but they just didn’t catch my attention to the point that I wanted to waste my precious hours conquering level after level of some platform game; I’d much rather have spent my time staring passively at non-interactive entertainment.

All this changed when I met the Xbox. Our advances in technology may not have brought us much closer to answering the big questions of life, but, damn, look at Pong now!

It turns out, many of my cohorts here at the Scene also own systems—and one game in particular: The Simpsons Road Rage. Now, this game is already several years old and has been improved upon by the The Simpsons Hit & Run, but Road Rage is still in heavy rotation among our group. The game is pretty much a rip-off of Crazy Taxi (which got Fox sued by Sega) in which you drive around Springfield and pick up Simpsons characters who need rides to various places around town. You accrue money, which opens up game play to more vehicles and drivers, but you’re also being timed, so hurry up!

The best part of Road Rage is the Head to Head portion in which two players must race each other in a split-screen format to pick up the most customers and drop them off. Sounds simple, right? Well, it is, but you’re vying for one passenger at a time, and the passenger can be stolen by ramming the occupied car, which can lead to multiple turnarounds during a game if both players are good.

This is exactly what happened last weekend at the Rousing Road Rage Rivalry my partner and I hosted in our new self-installed home theater. Several of the aforementioned cohorts joined us, and we played Head to Head in a double-elimination format. I suck at driving games, so I came in last place, as was foreseen, but the competition between the other four players was fierce. One of the great things about modern gaming systems is that the games look so good, video game spectating can actually be just as entertaining as playing (especially on a screen five feet across!). During the tournament, we paired Apu against Snake because their cars match up most evenly, but for the final championship between the top two players, the rest of the group picked the cars. Matt Montoya and Nels Noseworthy battled out the final match as Lisa vs. Krusty and, in the end, Nels of classifieds walked away the champ by one passenger. We salute you, Mr. Noseworthy, King of Road Rage!