Paperboy, Atari ST

The 1989 Atari ST conversion of Paperboy is playable, but is less than adequate in terms of authenticity and longevity, in my humble opinion.

Once again we have another Paperboy conversion that has niggly turning, so getting to where you want to get to is not as fast or as intuitive as it should be. The movement isn’t bad, but it’s not quite right either…

Graphically, the ST port of Paperboy is reasonable. The screen scrolls smoothly enough, and the ST renditions of all the hazards and characters are okay (although they do seem to lack some frames of animation). Also, I didn’t much like the information panel around the play area. I don’t know what it was about it that bugged me. Maybe the fact that few Paperboy conversions resort to having an information panel? I dunno. I would’ve preferred it if they’d used the full screen as the play area instead.

Gameplay-wise, there’s something not entirely right with this version of Paperboy. I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but the sum of the parts of the ST version seem to be seriously lagging behind the excellence of the Amiga version. Which – considering that Atari usually pulled out all the stops to make ports of their own arcade games on the ST (their then flagship home gaming product) – makes this game a bit of a ‘blip’ on the system. Maybe because the game was developed by a third party (Elite), and not by Atari themselves.