The Simpsons Arcade Game - Gameplay

Gameplay

The player chooses from one of the remaining four Simpsons (as shown in playable order): Marge (The first player), who swings her vacuum cleaner; Homer (The second player), who punches and kicks; Bart (The third player), who wields his skateboard; and Lisa (The fourth player), who uses a jump rope like a whip. They fight through the employees and chase Smithers as he escapes through various Springfield landscapes. The game's levels are based on the streets of Springfield, Krustyland, the Springfield Discount Graveyard, Moe's Tavern, Springfield Butte, a dream world, the Channel 6 studio, and the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Each level ends with a boss whose speed and strength would increase after taking a set amount of damage.

In Stage 4 (Moe's Tavern), there are several arcade machines, including one of the Simpsons arcade game. There was an Aliens arcade game which features a Space Mutant (a recurring movie in the show) which gets scared off by a xenomorph from the Aliens film which happens to be Marge wearing a xenomorph costume. Aliens was made in 1990 by Konami.

Although the game is one of many beat 'em ups produced after Final Fight, it contained many innovations, including the option for two players to team up and attack enemies, with the exact attack differing slightly depending on which two characters were being used. Each character would occasionally perform an attack in the form of something going wrong: Marge's hair would get caught in her vacuum cleaner as she swung it, Homer would uppercut himself in the jaw, Bart would spin violently around on his skateboard and fall backwards, and Lisa's jump rope would tangle around her. Food could be used for healing, and various weapons and items could be obtained for use for a short time or for a one-time projectile attack. These items were often brought into the game by other Simpsons characters, and the Simpsons' own pets could be used as thrown weapons at various points in the game. The Japanese version of the game included small scale nuclear bombs that, when thrown, clear all on-screen enemies, as well as a life bar that can be doubled by eating food when your character's health was full. The main characters retained their voice actors from the show.

The game features two minigames in which players competed against each other to be the first to finish a task (inflating a balloon shaped like their character in the first game, waking up their character in the second). The minigame was based on repeated button-pushing, with the player who pushed the buttons fastest winning. If fewer than four players were present, the player or players competed against 1-3 computer-controlled characters in these minigames.

The game featured many enemies, ranging from the infamous men in the purple suits who had the ability to hold the player from behind, to battles with Bongo-like rabbits. The game included battling fat, old men; miniboss-like firemen; and even giant donuts.