Title: Paperboy 2
Release Date: November 1991
Developer: Tengen
Publisher: Mindscape Inc.
As mentioned in the previous post, November 1991 saw five U.S. only games released for the Super Nintendo. U.S. developed games, around this time, were well known for being of diminished quality compared to Japanese developed games. The first U.S. game of this month, Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball, did little to buck this trend, but this second game gave me a bit of hope, as it is the sequel to what is considered an NES classic. It turned out it is actually the same game just updated for the SNES.
Background
Paperboy 2 is developed by the infamous Tengen Inc. Tengen was a subsidiary company of Atari games who developed many games, primarily arcade ports, for the NES throughout the 80s and early 90s. Tengen, though, eventually went to legal blows with Nintendo over Nintendo's rigid control over licensing terms. When Nintendo refused to loosen up their licensing rights, Tengen decided to try to make their own bootleg games by breaking the NES's lockout chip. Through some shady dealings, Tengen managed to succeed, and thus Nintendo sued the pants off the company in an ongoing legal dispute that wasn't settled until the late 90s.
Mindscape, on the other hand, is a publisher that is less storied but well known for porting many console titles to the PC, specifically the Sim spinoff titles such as SimAnt and Sim Earth.
As for the game itself, Paperboy was originally an arcade title that was ported to the NES. Paperboy 2 is well known for being an almost carbon copy of the original but with some superficial additions.
Paperboy 2 has a simple premise. You are the eponymous Paperboy (or girl!) who is hired to deliver newspapers to the subscribers of the neighborhood paper. As a proper arcade title, your goal is to rack up as many points as possible rather than just beat the game. Your success/score is based on several things: how many newspapers you accurately throw (only into the mailboxes or front doorsteps), whether or not you throw your newspapers to subscribers instead of non-subscribers, and finally if you can perform "good deeds" vs. "bad deeds" for the neighborhood (i.e. if you stop a baby carriage vs. break a window). At the end of each level, as well, is a quick obstacle course with targets that you run in order to make extra points.
Gameplay
The game maintains its "pick up and play" arcade game style. It is a weird game in that it is fun to just pick up and mess around with (which is how most people will interact with it), but to actually complete the game, it is quite difficult, as the criteria for success are both obtuse to understand and difficult to pull off. First of all, at the beginning of each course, they show a map of the street as well as the houses which are included in your subscriber base. The game literally gives you about 3-4 seconds to memorize not only the shape of the street, but also which houses, out of around 20, are your subscribers. The game then functions as an autoscroller that moves at a good clip. If you miss one of the houses or throw too many papers (because you only have so many), then you are pretty much SOL as far as getting a perfect score and would have to reset to start over. You do get multiple attempts at each street, but the more you mess up initially, people will start dropping your service, and you will have less subscribers the next go around. Lose all your subscribers and you are fired.
Now when I played Paperboy 2 as a kid, I just had fun blasting everyone on the street with my newspaper. The "game within the game" came to be just creating as much havoc as possible. It is fun, and the game allows this, but it will quickly shoo you into a fail state and expect you to play the game for real.
Paperboy 2 is certainly fun and has a goofy charm to it. You can willy-nilly throw your newspapers and cause havoc to the neighborhood to rather hilarious effect. For example you can knock an old couple off the rocking chair on their front porch, or knock the jack off a car which a man is working under. Some of the houses, as well, are medieval castles or haunted houses, one of which has Death himself chase after you as you go by.
The game has a great system for reporting your progress at the end of the level. Your progress is reported in the daily paper of course. Say you save the local convenience store from robbers, than the paper will display the cops awarding you some candy for being such a "good boy." Say you destroy a bunch of windows with stray newspapers, then the paper will report "Cops Baffled by Rampant Vandalism."
The games controls are rather wonky. Since everything is done on an isometric or 2.5D perspective, the Paperboy moves on a diagonal. Since the game is trying to give you plenty of room to see the houses and the shenanigans going on there, you really don't have much of a view of what is coming down the road, which sometimes leads to obstacles, such as cars, popping up with only a split second to avoid them. You can move towards the middle of the room, but then you see little of the houses and where you have to aim, so it is always a tradeoff.
Any good Paperboy 2 music?
The music is very...chunky? It is only the one song, though.
Ads and Commercials
Final Verdict
The game is really, really short, but the gameplay is relatively fun. It is cheap too...honestly if this game was 99 cents, then it would be worth a grab, but there is honestly 5-10 minutes of gameplay here.
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