Game Reviews

Paperboy

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Paperboy

Paperboy is a gritty, occasionally scandalous portrait of an adolescent boy and the deterioration of his family. Jack, the only child of a drug-abusing single mother, takes to the streets in violent pursuit of recognition, symbolically using newspapers to damage property and injure suburbanites.

Actually, the truth is much simpler. He’s just a brat on a bike chucking newspapers at people for points.

If you were thinking there was some kind of timeless classic beneath the game's awkward, fidgety, ridiculously simplistic surface then prepare for another simpler truth: it's not as good as you remember.

I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike

The big idea is to ride down a street and deliver newspapers to subscribers. Of course, you have to get out of the way when cars try to run you over, dogs nip at your heels, or kids block the way with flash breakdancing. A paperboy’s job is a lot harder than it looks.

Successfully delivering newspapers to every subscriber on the street for a week without losing all your lives wins the game. Failure to deliver a newspaper to a subscriber or destroying his property immediately cancels a subscription.

And that's not all - the next day, that disgruntled erstwhile customer will demonstrate his disgruntlement by laying a trap or trying to push you off your bike. It’s possible to recover a lapsed subscriber, however, by delivering to every other subscriber on the street in a single day.

If only it were as easy to control the action as it is to ride a bike. A virtual D-pad or pseudo-slider are your best bets, though a tilt method is offered. Despite offering the best lateral control, tilting to move makes for the sort of reckless, instantly regrettable gameplay that ought to be cast aside like a wet newspaper.

None of these control schemes feels quite as tight or responsive it should, given the quick manoeuvring required.

Training wheels

Fulfilling the game's brat quotient is the ability to vandalise the cheapskates unwilling to shell out for a subscription. In what is surely a missed opportunity, you're restricted to lobbing papers through their windows. No getting off your bike to spray paint the walls with neon, middle class condescension.

When you’re done delivering papers and juvenile delinquency headlines for the day, you can hit an off-road training course area with ramps, obstacles, water hazards, and pop-up targets. Wiping out here won’t lose a life, but it will end the course.

None of this makes Paperboy headline material, particularly given the unwieldy controls. There’s an optional 3D graphics mode, but it’s ugly and feels clumsy and inaccurate. Times have changed, and this particular game hasn't pedalled fast enough to keep up.

Paperboy

Paperboy is the victim of a ride-by, its antiquated gameplay not helped by control schemes ill-fit to its rigid design
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Tarryn van der Byl
Tarryn van der Byl
A pathologically reclusive supervillain, Tarryn spends most of her time pretending she's shooting big, technologically improbable guns at aliens and avoiding meaningful social interaction. She also gets paid to do this. This life business couldn't have worked out much better.