You could have been a rogue agent infiltrating an enemy fortress. You could have been a super hero saving a major metropolitan city. You even could have become a valiant knight looking to rescue the fair princess from almost certain doom.
No, you chose to be the kid on a bike delivering newspapers.
In the case of this Xbox Live Arcade release, you paid $5 for that privilege too. Maybe that’s what makes Paperboy special. It’s a totally unique title that squeezed out before the entire industry collapsed and managed to become one of the few remnants of that dark era. We’ve all been the generic knight, the super hero, and the government agent. It takes an incredible risk to release a game like Paperboy to an action-oriented market.
It must be the game’s endearing quirkiness that has kept people’s attention for nearly 25 years. Your enemies are stray cats, bad drivers, break dancers, feuding neighbors, and that idiot kid who never looks where he’s going on his big wheel. Your only weapon on this isometric dysfunctional street of death is the daily news.
The concept continues its impossibly addictive nature by ensuring you’re not only staying uninjured, but that you’re doing the job right. Subscribers to your publication are awfully finicky, willing to ditch their entire subscription if you toss a paper just left of their door. Non-subscribers have their houses decked out in black with gargoyles guarding their porch. Apparently, it’s some bizarre ritual in this neighborhood to rapidly dress up your house when the paperboy fails miserably.
After establishing that nothing here actually makes sense, you can begin to enjoy Paperboy. While ridiculously frustrating thanks to stiff controls, the game quickly wins you over with bright graphics (sadly not updated in this Xbox Live Arcade port), barely intelligible voice clips, and a the sense that you need to make one more run to see what lies behind the seventh house on Easy Street.
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