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A fan-made remaster mod of The Simpsons: Hit & Run is in the works, and the modder working on it has completely reanimated all of the cutscenes.
Last week, modder El Gato Del Tejado put out a video covering everything they are doing to remaster the popular PlayStation 2 game. The video starts off by showing a range of the 2D textures in the game and how they’ve been redone to be more crisp and high resolution.
El Gato then goes into some detail on the various player character models, which aren’t an easy fix due to things like Lisa’s hair actually being a flat texture that always faces the camera, so they’re still working out some kinks.
The biggest change that El Gato is making is with the cutscenes. In the original game, all the cutscenes are pre-rendered and 3D, which, due to obvious limitations from the time, don’t look amazing. El Gato noted they would love to see the cutscenes remade with current 3D technology, citing the Crash Bandicoot remake as an example.
But due to having limited experience in 3D animation, El Gato chose another, still quite laborious method: 2D animation. While they started out trying to rotoscope all of the animation, they ran into trouble with the character models, as things didn’t quite look right when turned into 2D.
El Gato arrived at the decision to animated everything by hand, going back to the reference sheets that had all of the dos and don’ts when drawing a Simpsons character by creator Matt Groening himself. The result are some genuinely impressive cutscenes that aren’t too far off from the show’s style.
The fan remaster obviously isn’t finished, but El Gato plans to continuously post video updates on the development of the project.
The Simpsons: Hit & Run originally came out for the PS2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC in 2003, and was highly regarded by both fans and critics alike. It was essentially a GTA clone that let you explore the town of Springfield, with the entire Simpsons family bar Maggie as playable characters, as well as Apu.
Last year, Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman said that he’d loved to see an official remaster of the game.
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