Paperboy

Thoughts by Mr Creosote (27 Apr 2002) – C64

Paper delivery is a common way of increasing your pocket money. At least I guess it is in the USA. This game is the ultimate simulator of this thrilling job. You can use it to evaluate if this job suits your abilities and interests or for training purposes to improve your service.

Your route is exactly one street. About half of the people living there are subscribers. You take your bike and drive along the straight street. Stopping at every house? Waste of time! You just throw the papers in the general direction of the mailbox and hope you won’t hit a window.

For some reason, all your subsribers live on the left side of the street. And since you can only drive your route from ‘bottom’ to ‘top’, you’ll have to drive either on the wrong side of the street (where cars might crash into you frontally) or navigate through the crowds and obstacles next to it. But not everyting is hazardous: picking up new paper supplies could be useful from time to time…

If you’re doing a good job, more people will subscribe and on the next day, their mailbox will be visible to you. If you fail to deliver the paper to someone too often, he’ll cancel his subscription though. So your success determines the complexity of the next day’s course.

Very clever idea, nicely converted into a game with good graphics and some funny details. After some time, you’ll long for some more diversity of course. But keep in mind that if you don’t know this classic, you’ll be shunned by every intelligent being!