Thursday, April 18, 2013

P is for Paperboy

Paperboy was one of those games that was easy to start to play, hard to learn to play well, but still typically was fun almost every time you played due to the ridiculous things you could do while playing the game.  In case you couldn't guess from the title, you're a paperboy, whose objective is to safely deliver papers to the light colored subscriber houses while simultaneously avoiding obstacles and vandalizing the dark colored non-subscriber houses.  Obstacles range from cars, people, fences, dogs, breakdancers, bombs and bees (the same ones from 720 degrees) if you go too slowly.

Honestly, did anyone ever deliberately start the game on Hard Way?  I always picked Easy Street, and even doing so only usually allowed me to last a couple of delivery days (usually).  I also usually managed to crash and burn early on in the obstacle course that you try to complete after you reach the end of the street.

One of my favorite things about the game was the controls, which were designed to look like bike handle bars.  You push the handle bars forward to go faster, pull back to go slower, and the buttons for throwing papers were on the handle bars too.  It felt pretty much like you were steering a bike as you were playing.

I also have fond memories of the game because I had a paper route as a kid, so I remember those days of biking around with a heavy load of papers and delivering them.  Nowadays I think the paper gets delivered by some guy driving around in a car.  Thankfully I never had to deal with obstacles like the guy in Paperboy though :-)

How many days could you survive on Paperboy?

6 comments:

  1. Sounds like an interesting game! I like your blog!!

    No telling how long I could last. Not a real game player.

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  2. Oh my gosh I forgot all about this game. My kids use to play it all the time!! Great post!
    Connie
    A to Z-ing to the end
    Peanut Butter and Whine

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    1. Thanks Connie - Paperboy was definitely memorable.

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  3. I could last longer on the NES version of Paperboy than on the arcade cabinet. And, while I never did have my own paper route, I did sub for some friends while they were out of town.

    As for staying power, I could usually last a couple of days. If I remember correctly, the arcade only allowed you to miss a certain number of subscriber houses where as with the NES version, I usually ran out of lives before loosing most/all of my subscribers. Or, I'm just remembering things incorrectly.

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    1. For the arcade version, if you failed to deliver to at least one subscriber on a given day, your game would be over. If you managed to deliver to all subscribers on a given day, one (or more? can't remember) subscriber would be added (thereby making your next day a little "easier".

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