Paperboy 2 (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
225A playthrough of Mindscape's 1992 arcade-style action game for the NES, Paperboy 2.
I played through each of the three streets as Paperboy. The three difficulty levels feature entirely different street layouts, so I thought it appropriate to include all three.
Coming out about five months after the original SNES game (https://youtu.be/hKqj1BbkVI8 ), Paperboy 2 for the NES is a somewhat ambitious 8-bit conversion of the console-only followup to Atari's mid-80s arcade hit.
Like in the original Paperboy (https://youtu.be/PNOtlDvBVW8 ), you play as a kid delivering newspapers to subscribers on his route over the course of a week. Any house expecting a paper will have a mailbox set out front, but if you fail to deliver (or smash a window), the angry customer will cancel their subscription. If you lose all your subscribers it's game over, but you can regain a lost subscriber with each day that you manage a "perfect delivery."
But of course, making these deliveries is easier said than done. The route is fraught with peril, and only the most observant and nimble of underpaid adolescents will survive the trial. Dogs give chase, runaway baby carriages go tearing down sidewalks, hands reach out of storm drains - there are a lot more hazards this time out, and they're all pretty outlandish.
You can gain bonus points from stopping these hazards with a well aimed paper, as well as by wreaking havoc in the neighborhood. See a guy working on his car in the driveway? Toss a paper at the car to knock it off its jack stands, pinning the guy underneath! Don't like the way an elderly couple relaxes on their porch swing? Smack them with a paper to knock them off! Want to make an impression on the bikini-clad sunbather? Hit her with a paper to see her get drenched by a sprinkler! Funny stuff.
The NES port contains pretty much everything that was in the SNES game. All of the different houses and hazards, the turns in the roads, and the obstacle courses have made the transition, and despite the overall lack of color, it looks fairly good. The sound also makes the jump intact - though the NES's triangle wave is no match for the funky slap bass on the SNES, the music is still as catchy and corny as ever, and the sampled sound effects are clear.
The playability has taken a hit in the conversion, though. The game suffers from rampant bouts of slowdown on the NES (and often at the moments when you are most relying on the controls to be precise), and on the harder levels, the flicker that occurs at these points has the nasty habit of obscuring hazards as they fly at you. The slowdown also seems to effect the rate at which you can throw papers, which tends to be frustrating in the harder stages.
It generally plays well, but it seems that the developers tried to push the NES hardware a bit too much at times, and the game suffers for it. Still, if you were a Paperboy fanatic back in the day and hadn't yet bought a 16-bit console, Paperboy 2 on the NES was a reasonable alternative that retained most of the fun of the original.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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