Paperboy review - Nintendo Entertainment System

It's early morning - time to wipe the sleep from your eyes and merrily jump atop your trusty BMX bike (even if you do want a mountain bike like everyone else). Now, just take a trip to the local corner shop and pick up your daily round of the Daily Sun newspaper. Your early morning mission of mercy is simple. Just deliver your round of papers to the houses of all of your subscribers. Easy huh?

But the paperboy you control doesn't fancy getting off his bike and delivering his round by hand like normal boys of his age. On no, your job is carried out simply by riding along the isometric-scrolling 3D streets throwing the papers at the subscribers' homes, hoping to catch their mailbox or letterbox.

Unfortunately, although the inhabitants of this street like the Daily Sun a lot - they don't like you much at all.

What the Mean Machines staff thought

Dear oh dear... After the fabulous Master System conversion, this NES conversion came as rather a shock. Rather than being as close to the coin-op as the Sega version, it's a jerky parody of the Atari original. The scrolling is smooth enough, but the graphics are a complete mess. The artist responsible for this must have come fresh from nursery school - they're that bad. The sprites look like refugees from Legoland, and the sound is similarly dire. Playability - where's it gone? Your two-speed BMX is completely uncontrollable and reluctant to obey your joypad's commands and the collision detection is completely inaccurate. There's a load of great NES games on the market now, but this crippled cart isn't one of them.

I like Paperboy in the arcades, but this ghastly excuse of a conversion is nothing like Atari's classic coin-op. Horrible, tasteless colours and retarded sprites make the game ugly to look at, and the booming tunes and feeble effects are a sick mockery of their arcade counterparts. This could be forgiven if the gameplay was enjoyable, but sadly it's lacking in that department too. A few games are what it takes to get completely annoyed by the slug-like controls and hopeless collision detection, and after that it's time to put paperboy into early retirement.