Paperboy

"With a neighborhood like this, maybe a paperboy delivering is newsworth"

Paperboy is one of the most famous video games that has ever existed, so I think I can safely skip straight past my usually long-winded and tedious schpiel about the nature of the game or how it entered my gaming life.

You play--surprise!--a paperboy, and what with the street you make your deliveries on, the agency must be desperate to take anybody who'll walk in the door. You've got to deliver a paper onto the door step or mailbox of every subscriber on your street in order to keep your job, but of course, this being a video game, it's not that simple. Just about everything on the street is out to get you. There's cars, tornadoes, guys with jack hammers, guys with skateboards, kids on big wheels, break dancers (or guys itching their butts, if you asked my third grade class), dogs (of course), and the obligatory Grim Reaper.

That's right, the Angel of Death doesn't want you filling your quota. No wonder there's a paperboy training course at the end of your route. It obviously takes some seriously tough delivery kids to make sure people get their morning papers on the Grim Reaper's street.

As you would expect, you're required to deliver papers to subscribers on your street (the people who live in brightly-painted houses, just so you don't get confused). You need to chuck a paper so it lands on their mailbox, doorstep or in their garage, and where it goes depends on how many points you get for making the drop off. Fail to make it, though, or break a window, and they'll cancel their subscription. Quick as that, yeah. This means less points on every other day of the week, though. Fortunately, if you break windows on enough non-subscribers houses (the ones in the ugly gray houses, just so you know that they're evil) might sign up just so that you'll stop lowering the local property values with your reckless chucking of newspapers. And I love inflicting electronic wanton destruction anyway, but how could I say no when I get rewarded for it like that?

Tossed newspapers also make a handy defense against most of the critters looking to put a premature end to your news-delivering career, stopping even the noisiest dog in his tracks, but newspapers don't grow on trees. You have ten at a time, and need to pick up the glowing bundles holding more to have enough to complete your route as well as do something about the occasional nimrod trying to knock you off your bike. And there's the neo-cubist training course at the end of the street where you can get rid of your remaining papers by throwing them at targets for additional points.

Graphically speaking, the game won't blow anybody away. While the arcade version looked like a cartoon about the adventures of a paperboy, the NES graphics are some of the most primitive I've seen this side of an Atari 2600 game. Not that they're THAT bad, you can tell what everything is supposed to be. But barely.

Sound doesn't really stand out either. There's generic crashes and windows breaking, and those are the only things that stick in my mind from playing this game. But the gameplay, oh the gameplay makes it all worthwhile. You can never stop pedaling, but riding down the street breaking windows, knocking out burglars and taking a pot shot at the Grim Reaper make this game worth your time and money.

If the real suburban streets were like this, there wouldn't be any such things as a paperboy, but as usual even the most tedious thing becomes a lot more interesting when transferred to the realm of video games. That is indeed a world where even the lowly paperboy can be a front page hero.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 06/26/04