Paperboy 2 (SNES) Review (Retro WedNESday #19)
Developer: Tengen
Publisher: Mindscape
Released: 1991
We’ve spent the last couple of weeks racing the Baja and fishing, both on the SNES, and this week I’m sticking with the platform. I’ve put down the fishing rod and picked up a newspaper. Not to read it, mind you, but rather to hopefully toss it into a paper box and not through someone’s window.
It’s time for Paperboy 2 on SNES, which released back in 1991. I’m not entirely sure when, but I figure I probably got my hands on this one sometime around 1993 or 1994. So the bulk of my time playing this game, a lot mind you, would’ve been when I was around eight years old.
There are three things I remember about it from back then. The first is the absolute absurdity of the game. According to this game, delivering papers is the most hazardous job ever, and kids were expected to do it. Everything is out to get the paperboy. The second is related to the first, and that’s the difficulty. This game was hard, and revisiting it, it’s still hard. It’s actually harder now, but that’s more because I hadn’t played it in probably 30 years. And while we’ll get there, the camera isn’t great and neither are the controls, which adds to the difficulty. And finally, I remember that after a lot of playing it, I was actually pretty good at this as a kid but it took a lot of practice to get good at it.
So for this review, I’m going to judge it partially on how it is today having played it for about three hours, and also on how I remember it as a kid. Because it was extremely difficult as a kid, just as it is now, but got a lot easier the more time I spent with it. Obviously, I’m not going to devote the time to it now that I did back then because I’m not a kid anymore and have hundreds of games that I didn’t have back then.
Paperboy 2 was developed by Tengen, who I remember fondly as the developers of the second and third RBI Baseball games, both of which I played a lot.
I played the original Paperboy one time, and it was in an arcade. Never played the home NES version of it. So I don’t compare Paperboy 2 to the original, but I do know that the second one added houses to deliver to on both sides of the road. That alone instantly adds difficulty.
On paper, I know, Paperboy sounds like a straightforward premise that shouldn’t be too difficult. You’re a kid who gets a job to deliver newspapers to all the subscribers on the route. Hop on your bicycle and stroll through the neighborhood tossing the newspaper into paper boxes ideally or the front door.
But the catch is, you can’t stop your bicycle, so you’re constantly going forwards (though you can slow down quite a bit) and every damn thing imaginable is out to knock you off your bike or cause you to miss your throw. Missing a house or breaking their window will cause them to unsubscribe from the paper. But if you break the window of someone who doesn’t subscribe, you get bonus points!
And what’s standing in your way of successfully delivering the morning news? It would be easier to list the things that weren’t. We’ve got oncoming traffic, which isn’t a problem when you’re on the sidewalk, but you can’t stay on the sidewalk because there’s an endless parade of stuff coming down it too. There’s a dude who has an infinite supply of tires that he rolls across the screen at you, a haunted house that will send a ghost to knock you off your bike, runaway baby carriages, dogs, pedestrians, and heroic events that can distract you like stopping a robbery.
And because this is a neighborhood, we’ve got a gothic house with fire-breathing gargoyles and, for some reason, a castle/fortress launching cannonballs at us.
When you factor in all of that and combine it with the fact that you have to deliver to both sides of the road, while constantly moving forward, and with a slightly angled isometric camera perspective, it gets to be a lot to juggle. Sometimes you think a straightforward toss is lined up, but apparently not because there goes the paper sailing through the window.
The controls are a little frustrating at times unless you can master the slowing down and turning, which I never could. I’ve seen people barely miss a fence by like a pixel, but if I was close to it I’d hit it. The controls aren’t awful, just weird. And that could just be a me thing, since I don’t remember having any complaints about the controls when I was kid. Of course I was using a real SNES controller then and not an Xbox controller plugged into my PC.
If surviving the route wasn’t difficult enough, afterwards you get a little bonus course thing where you can earn some extra points and practice your maneuverability and throwing skills without worry of messing something up and losing subscribers.
If you do well on Easy Street, you can get promoted to Middle Road, and eventually Hard Road, where we start seeing longer streets, more obstacles, and better looking houses. Of course those nice houses are still surrounded by junkyards and cannon-shooting castles. But now it’s a nicer castle.
Graphically, I always thought Paperboy 2 looked pretty good and believe it still holds up pretty well. There’s a nice vibrancy to the colors, and I always appreciated the fact that subscribers’ houses are nice and colorful while the houses of non-subscribers were darkened. You have a map after clearing the day that shows you which houses have subscribed or unsubscribed, but thanks to the colors of the house you don’t have to try and memorize it. I guess even Tengen had a little bit of a heart there and didn’t want to tack on yet another layer of difficulty.
If there’s one flaw with the presentation of Paperboy 2, it’s the god-awful soundtrack. It’s got a certain charm for about five minutes, but then it quickly gets to be annoying. I will say though, that it’s definitely a memorable collection of tunes and sound effects. If I hear it, I instantly recognize it.
So does Paperboy 2 still hold up today? Yes and no. My reflexes aren’t what they used to be, and I’m not going to sit and play it for hours at a time every day like I did as a kid, so the difficulty is pretty rough. I never did complete it as a kid because I could never get past Hard Road without losing all my lives.
For people who think repetitiveness in games is a deal breaker, there’s not much you’d like about Paperboy 2. It’s pretty much exactly the same. Some scenery changes as your route gets harder, but you’re still doing the same thing over and over; trying to deliver newspapers while avoiding a relentless onslaught of obstacles determined to wreck you.
I think the difficulty of it adds to the charm, and that’s not just because we’re in an era that outside of certain genres is determined to not be challenging. There’s a sense of accomplishment, then and now, to finally getting promoted to the next route, failing, but then having an easier time getting back to it. It’s like everything in life, the more you do it and get accustomed to the patterns, the easier it starts to become.
I have fond memories of spending countless hours with this game growing up. And no matter how long it had been since playing it, revisiting it was like being transplanted back to that time. Everything was instantly recognizable like no time had passed. Some games you don’t remember that well and when you return to it, you’re thinking “man, I don’t remember this at all.” Paperboy 2 was so over the top with memorable scenes and antics that it doesn’t have that problem. It’s like a film you haven’t seen in 20 years but used to watch all the time, watch it again and still remember all the lines. It just comes right back to you.
Paperboy 2 is far from being one of the standout games in the impressive library of SNES titles, but it’s good enough that it warrants being experienced if you’ve never played it before. And it deserves to be given enough time to click before instantly writing it off because of difficulty. This review has reached its conclusion, and I’m itching to get back to playing it. Mainly because I was close to Middle Road last time, and I know I can get back there again.
Paperboy 2 gets a three out of five: WORTHY.
Did you ever play Paperboy 2, or the original or the Nintendo 64 abomination? Share your memories in the comments, and join us next week for another Retro WedNESday adventure.
