Even though its short, The Simpsons Game on the DS is very good
For the most part, the Simpsons Game is a simple platformer which has nothing new to bring to the genre, but it manages to be fun despite this. You play as Bart, Homer, Marge and Lisa and each of them has their own special abilities. Homer can transform into a big ball and roll over enemies for example. Bart is the only one who can use a ranged attack, Marge can form a gang of people to go and destroy certain things and Lisa is the only one who can manipulate the levels themselves. Each character has more than one ability (exept Marge, but who don't play as her much though), but you get the idea.
Most of the time (except for Marge) you'll be running, jumping, using levers collecting things and using basic attacks to kill enemies. As you can imagine, the bulk of the game is pretty standard stuff, so how does the game keep thing entertaining. Well in some cases you get to play a minigame that bltantly rips off and makes fun of other games (more on that later), shootingat aliens Space Invaders style, jumping on moving logs to cross rivers like in Frogger. These help shake things up a bit but its the comedy of the game that really keeps you going. The many cutscenes in the game are almost like watching parts of the cartoon (albeit a lot funnier than most recent episodes) as they have had loads of voice work put into them. The voice work doesn't stop their though, throughout the levels you will hear loads of one liners from the characters. They tend to repeat themselves after a while but their funny and the shear amount of speech in the game will impress you anyway, there really is loads of it.
Also, like the bigger console versions of the game, the DS version has Video Game Cliches in it aswell. Remember the bit about Space Invaders and Frogger, play through one of them succesfully to unlock a cliche about them. Find enemies that keep appearing out of the same place, that's a cllche for you to find. Everything from double jumping to breakable crates to triple combo punches can be found here, and a quick look in the Anderoids Dungeon (which is one of the many places to select form the easy to use touch screen map) will reveal all the characters unlocked tokens, how many collectibles needed on a given level to unlock a token and what Video Game cliches you've unlocked along with some pretty funny coments from Comic Book Guy.
Even though all those parts of the game are good there are still a few problems. The 2D view of this version of the game does mean there are less problems with the camera found in the bigger console versions of the game, but there are still some times when you have to make a leap of faith and hope that there is a platform just off the screen. It can be really annoying to work your way up a tall level only to miss a platform and fall a long way down. The ability to scroll the screen to the left or right would have fixed this but no such feature is there. Also, the game is very short. You could probably beat all the levels in about four hours. Fortunately, there are some reasons to repley the levels. You can collect all of the collctibles in each level for each character, you can collect all of the Vidoe Game cliches and there are sure to be one or two levels that you'll want to play again just because they're so good.
There is even a multiplayer mode in this as well. Its a little basic but it still provides a decent source of fun. You can play with two to four players, the modes include Bart Match which is basically a 2D deathmatch, Kapture the Koveted Krusty which is a bit like capture the flag, Hungry Homer where you try to eat as much food as possible to earn calories. You can also attack each other to knock the caloiries offf their score. Finally there is Golden Donut which is very similar to Kapture the Koveted Krusty but plays out a little differently. There a few power ups that make the multiplayer modes a little bit more interesting but they're nothing special. Oh, and you can play using single card play which is a bonus.
The Simpsons Game for the DS is not the best game of its type for the console, but if you like the Simpsons, can make use of its multiplayer or like a game that has a lot of laughs, then its probably worth your time and money to pick it up.