Paperboy review - Sega Megadrive

Atari's Paperboy first appeared in the arcades nearly seven years ago, and cast you as a paper deliverer whose round takes him to the very strangest parts of town. In this Megadrive conversion, all of the original coin-op's features have been included as you battle against the odds to get your papers delivered.

At the start of the game there are three streets to choose from, effectively giving three difficulty levels. Each level is split into seven sub-levels, each of which represents a day of the week. The object is simply to survive until Sunday.

At the beginning of each round you're shown a map of your delivery route. You must deliver papers to every subscriber, by throwing them either into their mailboxes or on their doormats as you cycle past.

Non-subscribers should be treated with the contempt the deserve, so throw spare papers through their windows and ride all over their nice flower beds for bonus points.

If you fail to deliver a paper to a subscriber, he cancels his subscription - a perfect round of deliveries, however, results in new customers!

Things are complicated by the presence of various obstacles such as lawn mowers, buggies, cassette players, and even ghosts! If you hit any of these, a life is lost - so careful with those handlebars.

What the Mean Machines staff thought

Arrrgghhhhh! Paperboy scores top marks in the frustration stakes owing to two incredibly irritating factors. First of all, the collision detection is exceptionally is dodgy, resulting in lots of unforeseen and very unfair trips to the cemetery. Secondly, the control method is just plain stupid. Control of the bike seems to pivot around the back wheel, making for very unresponsive and unrealistic gameplay. Other than those two factors, paperboy remains quite faithful to coin-op with backdrop graphics that mimic the coin-op adequately and loads of great sampled sounds. Some of the sprites (like your bike) seem a bit ropey around the edges, but otherwise this conversion looks and sounds just like the real thing. This game is obviously a good buy for fans of the original, but I felt that ultimately it was just too annoying to make it much fun at all.

With its crisp and great tunes, this conversion looks and sounds identical to the original coin-op classic. However, it falls down on its playability due to very poor bike handling and naff collision detection. For a start, the response to the joypad is sluggish, but more importantly the game suffers from the same irritating and unrealistic "rear wheel steer" that plagued computer and Lynx versions of the game. Basically the bike pivots from its rear tyre rather than turning using the front wheel like it did in the original arcade game, which makes precise control very difficult. The programmers of the superb Master System version avoided this problem, so it's annoying to see it rear its ugly head here. The aforementioned collision detection is just plain frustrating - the bike often hits things you think you've avoided, and then sails unscathed through what looks like a fatal collision. If these flaws had been removed, this would have been a perfect conversion. But they haven't, and the end result is a disappointing game which you get the feeling could easily have been so much better.