38. Paperboy
One man's trash is another man's treasure (and, to foreshadow, also vice-versa). The glasses of nostalgia are often rose-tinted. Sometimes no news is good news. Should I drop a few more cliches to kill time, or should I just get on with the review?
On the off-chance you're not already enlightened (or can't suss it out based on the name alone, like most of us did), Paperboy is an Atari arcade smash-hit of the early 80s in which you play a newspaper delivery boy for the Daily Sun, navigating through suburbia on your BMX bike, aiming to hurl your allotment of papers onto front doorsteps or into open mailboxes on the sidewalk, while often narrowly missing your target and smashing a window or two instead. Along the way, various obstacles and antagonists like cars, pitbulls, assorted CHUDs and meatheads will threaten your well-being. If you somehow survive this onslaught with one or more of your three lives intact, you're rewarded with a challenging do-or-die stunt course. Beat the stunt course, rest up, repeat it 6 more times - all in a honest week's work.
Paperboy thrilled arcade audiences with its unique premise and innovative diagonal-scrolling gameplay, resulting in a slew of computer and console ports, including this best-selling Commodore 64 version published by Elite Systems. Though gamers were eager to accept their new paper routes, arcade hardware and coding skill were both sharply increasing in this era, making the game a tall order to translate to home computing environments.
Let's start with gameplay. C64 Paperboy feels like it moves faster than the arcade version due to its decreased viewport, and the developer made no attempt to adjust the game's fairness with this limitation in mind. This means the bottom-right portion of the screen quickly becomes no man's land, lest you smash into an obstacle within milliseconds of it spawning on-screen. Twitch reaction skills become paramount, and yours truly didn't seem to be up to the task, making even the early levels an exercise in frustration.
Paperboy's graphics are a mixed bag overall, but I feel the developer made a valiant effort, and this is the one area where I feel this game gets a bad rap in the present day. Other reviewers have been quite critical of the game's visual presentation, but a picture-perfect arcade port was never within the realm of possibility. The vibrant colors and (relatively) high-resolution sprites of the original simply can't be reproduced by most home machines of the 80s, and even 16-bit machines like Atari's own ST struggled to reproduce the coin-op's polished aesthetics and smooth scrolling. Despite this, the C64 version is the nicest-looking 8-bit computer port, and nearly the best 8-bit port in general, surpassed only by the venerable Nintendo Entertainment System.
Though Paperboy often looks nice, the graphics also have some underlying technical failings. There's quite a bit of playfield "jittering" that negatively affects the gameplay, particularly at crosswalks, of which you'll encounter many. I also noticed some questionable sprite-collision behaviour, resulting in more than a few lost lives from hitting objects that I thought I had dodged.
The arcade original sounds great with its FM synth soundtrack and voice samples, and as you might expect, the C64 delivers neither of these elements. There's music, and the SID compositions still recall the feel of the original, but lack the pleasant Yamaha-and-POKEY tone and arrangements of its forebearer.
Much like reading a newspaper in the 21st century, Paperboy feels like a product of a bygone era, and I struggled to remain engaged on my few play-throughs of its Commodore port. The historical significance of the arcade version might demand a few cursory runs, but I can't find much reason to recommend this mediocre port to anyone beyond the most obsessive of 8-bit delivery boys, and its shortcomings will likely leave your patience stretched paper-thin before long.
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