Summary
The Perilous Life of a Paperboy
The Good
For a lot of people, newspaper delivery was their first job. Chances are, though, they never had it as bad as the star of Midway’s Paperboy series. For this paperboy (or papergirl) death lurks around every corner (sometimes literally). For the N64 iteration of Paperboy, the world is still a dangerous place, but this time the heroic delivery person is a bit less fragile.
Paperboy on the N64 takes the concept set by the previous arcade titles and expands upon it. You still deliver newspapers, but now you toss those papers in full 3D. There’s about 15 or so neighbourhoods, each of them with their own look and feel. There are trailer parks, a zoo, and even a suburb under siege by aliens. The environments are all very large, cluttered and fairly unique. There are a couple that repeat themes but their design makes them feel different.
The jump to 3D resulted in a bit of a hiccup. It takes a little while to get used to the aiming. The arrow that represents your paper’s trajectory sometimes is misleading. Luckily the game starts you off really slow to learn the ropes. Once you get a good grasp on it, it can be a lot of fun landing long distance throws.
Fans of the original Paperboy games can rest assured that this version keeps the humour that made the series so enjoyable intact. You can still brutally assault everyone you pass with a barrage of newspapers. Paperboy still faces unimaginable peril on his simple paper route. It’s all there, and it is all still very funny. In this iteration of the game, the beginning of each stage is greeted with a phony newspaper headline. Some are helpful hints, but others are genuinely clever. My favourite has a blank picture with the headline “Nothing Happened Today”.
The Bad
Paperboy 64 suffered from one huge, major problem; the sound compression. Everything in the game sounded muffled and distant. In some cutscenes, I didn’t even know what the characters were saying. It’s a shame, too, because some of the sounds are very fun and quirky, and the music is very memorable. The voice work might have even been well done, but I’ll never know, I couldn’t understand it. Even the paperboy’s victory phrase was muffled beyond comprehension. What’s that paperboy? “Outside”? “You’re sorry”? What are you trying to tell me, boy?
The graphics are pretty brutal as well. The artists tried for a retro 3D feel to it all, and it does go a long way to hide the ugliness of it, but not far enough. It’s difficult to tell what some of the objects are supposed to be. I’m pretty certain that nobody outside the paperboy has a face. Worse yet, draw distance fog was about 5 feet away from you and thick as pea soup. It’s like the world ends right in front of you.
Paperboy 64 commits no grand gameplay-sin. It’s solid enough, and everything is well-tuned. The problem is, it isn’t much of a concept. There’s only so much they can throw at you when all you’re doing is tossing papers into mailboxes. It can get kind of boring. There are boss battles, but they aren’t very creative or challenging. It’s not that the game isn’t fun; just don’t expect to form a major addiction to it.
The Bottom Line
Paperboy is a strange game to review. It’s an often overlooked entry in the Paperboy series, and I believe it has been unjustifiably bashed by critics and gamers. There’s nothing terrible about the game. In fact, there’s a lot to love about Paperboy. There’s a very charming game buried under the terrible graphics and muffled audio, one that’s easy to recommend. That’s because Paperboy is an OKAY game.
