Objective : Survive until Sunday!
At the start of the game there are three streets to choose from, effectively giving you three difficulty levels. Each level is split into seven sub levels, each of which represents a days of each 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 the mailbox or onto their doormats as you cycle past. Non-subscribers should be treated with the contempt they deserve, so throw spare papers through their windows and ride all over their nice flowerbeds 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, biggies, cassette players, and even ghosts! If you hit any of these, a life is lost – so careful with those handlebars.
The original Atari coin-op appeared in the early 1986's and wowed arcade goers with its combination of great graphics, sampled speech and usual handlebar controls. However, it did have one flaw – right at the end of the bonus round, cycling between the grandstand and the fence sent the scoring system crazy, and you'd end up with well over a billion points!!
I remember crowding around the coin-op all those years ago – and this version captures that “can't level it alone” feeling! The originality of the arcade game coupled with the brilliance of this conversion makes a real winner as far as I'm concerned: it's the best translation onto a home machine there's been. It's difficult, but doesn't seem to be while you're playing it – that's the beauty of this game! Whether or not you are a fan of the coin-op, this will keep you happy for a long time, so don't delay: track down a copy and get delivering!
Overall
This conversion captures all the humour, originality and playability of the arcade machine. It seems very straightforward at first, but once mad dogs, nutty street dancers, run away tyres and even the rogue drivers enter the fray, things start getting very tough indeed. It's great fun trying to get all the papers in the mailbox, but my favourite part of the game is causing as much damage to non-subscribers' properties as possible! With its fantastic graphics and faithful arcade tunes, paperboy should find a place in any arcade fan's cartridge collection.