Review
Doesn’t deliver
by Craig Grannell (November 24th, 2010 at 1:25 pm)
Game: Paperboy: Special Delivery. Publisher: Glu. Price: 59p/€0,79/99¢. Supports Game Center. Buy the game
Can there be a more thankless task than getting up at the crack of dawn to scribble addresses on loads of newspapers for delivery to ungrateful sods who moan if their daily collection of bile is a nanosecond late? If your answer is “Why, how about playing Paperboy on your iThing?” that would be pretty harsh—but not by much.
Paperboy is in fact the second version of the game to appear on the App Store, after the first was mysteriously kidnapped by a ninja disguised as Rupert Murdoch, wearing an Atari hat. Glu’s remake is somewhat faithful to the original—which means you’ll get dunked in a swimming pool of nostalgia jam, before realising that one of the ingredients of nostalgia jam is rotten entrails.
The main problem with Paperboy: Special Delivery is that it’s Paperboy. The original game was never that much good: ride along streets, fling newspapers at subscribers’ houses, and avoid all manner of pre-programmed idiots that kill you to death if you so much as graze them. Oddly, the newspapers appear to be wrapped around bricks, enabling them to become window-smashing or foe-smacking devices, offering precisely 37 percent of the fun available within the game. The rest arrived from the arcade cabinet’s controls, modelled on a real bike’s handlebars! Fancy!
Glu’s game is much the same (fun for eight seconds until you realise it’s annoyingly unforgiving), minus the handlebars. The graphics are more modern (read: uglier) and the controls are iThing-oriented (read: problematic, but as good as you’re going to get, and a few alternate mode are provided); there’s a ‘classic’ version (resembling the Atari game, but not using its visuals) and a ‘story’ mode that involves various inane tasks. It’s OK, but it’s still Paperboy—and without the handlebars, which we thought would make all the difference.
To test this theory, we taped our iPhone to our bike’s handlebars to see if it improved the game. It didn’t, and we were sadly killed when an atom from our bike’s tyre grazed a tiny remote controlled car that someone was driving around in circles.
It was an uncontrollable, overly difficult pain in the hole in the arcade and on every platform it was converted to, and I see this version also retains the weirdo not-quite-isometric projection that makes things impossible to aim. Eccch.
It’s so true: every single emulator, flash game or any iteration of Paperboy that has been available on any platform always make me go “ohhhh, PAPERBOY!” and then, 30 secs later after playing, pulling my hair and shouting all sort of nonsense about the developer’s mother and the damn cheating A.I. incorporated.
Beats me why i keep coming back to it…