EXTRA EXTRA! Read All About it!!!

[Ninot]

Paperboy just came out on XboxLive Arcade. I am incredibly excited and can't wait to get home.

Who's with me?!!

[duke o' york]

Extra extra? I was worried this would be another dumb Krazyhorse thread about infinity for a second.

Paperboy, on the other hand!

Shame it's only on Xbasket though.

[Asher]

Paperboy! Buying it tonight.

[DrSpike]

A classic, but can't really see what they would do with it on a modern platform. I'm intrigued though.

[Asher]

It's an XBLA arcade game...they're generally identical to the originals but with online play where appropriate.

[DrSpike]

Is that full price?

[Asher]

They're usually around $5-$10 depending on the game.

[DrSpike]

Oh ok, that sounds perfectly reasonable then. I'd pay $10 for a good version of Paperboy.

[LordShiva]

Is this the Paperboy that I used to play on NES?

[Asher]

It's $5.

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/764/764099p1.html

February 13, 2007 - Back in the good old days before the Internet took over our lives, people used to sit down each morning with a balanced breakfast and a steaming cup of coffee to read the morning news. Of course it was actually last night's news which may be why internet sites have become so popular, but the point is that somebody had to deliver those newspapers in the wee hours of the morning. Even up against potholes, remote control cars, break dancing maniacs and the Grim Reaper himself, the paperboy would make deliveries to his customers and smash the windows of those who didn't want the news. Then at the end of his route, the paperboy would go through a BMX course and take a series of jumps while trying to nail targets with his excess papers to the delight of throngs of cheering fans.

Ok, so maybe that isn't quite how life was in the quaint days before we depended so greatly upon technology. But it is a basic summation of the classic arcade hit Paperboy which has made its way into the ever growing list of retro titles available on the Xbox Live Arcade. Like the rest of these updated classics, Paperboy will set you back 400 Microsoft points ($5 USD). It comes with a few new bells and whistles for your money, though the basic game is largely unchanged.

Part of what made Paperboy such a classic in the arcade was the handlebar controller the cabinet had. Obviously, you won't get that with the Live Arcade release. Thanks to the isometric view, this version of Paperboy suffers from the same wonky controls that every home version of the game has. As simple as the analog stick and A Button controls are, you'll still find yourself struggling to get your paperboy to ride his bike where you want to go.

The artwork has been "reworked" for the XBLA release of Paperboy but it looks just how you remember it. Unlike some other retro XBLA titles, there aren't any options for switching between enhanced graphics and the classic look. What you see is what you get. The same goes for the sound which maintains the muddied MIDI sounding voices and rhythms that some will remember from the arcade.

While Paperboy boasts multiplayer gaming as one of the new XBLA features, the options are fairly limited. The offline mode is a turn based affair that requires two controllers to be plugged in to start playing. Thankfully, each player can independently choose whether they are taking the easy street, the middle road, or the hard way.

Online has two different methods for playing; co-operative and versus. Neither mode allows you to see what your opponent is doing. You'll simply see their score and life indicator on the lower right corner of your screen and be given the option for talking with them via the Xbox Live headset. Like a few other XBLA retro games, the co-operative mode doesn't involve any actual teamwork per se. In fact, you'll just have your scores added together making this about as independent as a co-operative game can get. What's more, the game cuts out when one person loses all of their lives, making it so that if you're good enough to avoid death, you won't get to finish your game. Your high scores for these modes, along with the general score for the arcade mode, are saved to the online leaderboards so that you can see how well you stack up against the entire world.

The other big addition to Paperboy is, obviously, the achievements -- 200 points worth to be exact. Most of them in Paperboy are easily obtainable, but they do have a nice spread in their requirements forcing players to master various aspects of the game rather than simply getting a high enough score. We also found that we were awarded a new Paperboy gamerpic after we unlocked a certain number of achievements which is certainly a nice touch.

Paperboy was, and still is to a certain extent, a fun game. The wacky obstacles and extreme difficulty combined to present a game that was at the peak of the quarter munching arcade phenomenon. With the XBLA release, you no longer have to keep pumping quarters into the machine in search of the high score, but the classic format of having a very short game with a high level of difficulty doesn't hold up so well in the depth department decades later. As such, this iteration of Paperboy is the type of game that you'll download and have fun with for a couple of hours or so before moving on to something else.

Like most of the retro Xbox Live Arcade titles, Paperboy is fun until the nostalgia wears off. This may come quicker for some than others, but in the end Paperboy just doesn't have the substance to keep anybody but the leaderboard obsessive or Paperboy nuts interested for very long.

[vee4473]

that's cool and all, but is the excitement just about the online play? these types of arcade compilations have been available for a long time, at least on the ps2. i have a ps2 disc with all kinds of classics including paperboy and defender.

help me out, what am i missing?

[Adagio]

And then they didn't even upgrade the graphics

[Asher]

Originally posted by vee4473
that's cool and all, but is the excitement just about the online play? these types of arcade compilations have been available for a long time, at least on the ps2. i have a ps2 disc with all kinds of classics including paperboy and defender.

help me out, what am i missing?

It's easier to get, and you don't need to buy it with 100 other games you'll never play?

[vee4473]

i suppose it's cheaper if all you want is paperboy, yeah.

I paid $20 for the midway arcade classics compilation for ps2 that had paperboy with defender, gauntlet, joust , spy hunter, marble madness and a bunch of other games. it's one of the "$20 classic series" or something.

Although marble madness is indeed maddening without a trackball...

I have a couple of them so i may be mixing up the games.

[DrSpike]

What can you get for $5? Even if it just an evening's entertainment (and pretty sure I could play it for one night) then you'd get your money's worth.