Paperboy review - Nintendo Entertainment System

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.