Paperboy, Nintendo 64

The Nintendo 64 version of Paperboy is one of the few full-3D remakes of the game. Everything in it has been changed and turned into 3D – the streets, the characters, and the gameplay. The game was developed by High Voltage Software and first published by Midway in 1999.

The basic premise stays the same, though, with you delivering newspapers from your trusty bicycle to local houses, which have mailboxes and doormats that you can aim at. You have a limited amount of time to complete your deliveries in every street, although you can cycle around and re-try any deliveries you may have missed earlier, which is a significant change to the original gameplay.

The aiming and firing mechanism has had some extra thought put into it and it feels pretty good to use, with an aiming cursor popping up when you hold the fire button down and also some sort of auto aiming going on. Time also seems to slow down when you’re aiming, and I don’t know if that was an intended effect by the developers or whether it was more of a result of the game slowing down when there was a lot going on on-screen… Paperboy does indeed suffer from occasional slowdown in spite of it being on Nintendo‘s most powerful console to date at that time.

On each street you have a minimum level of subscribers to deliver to. If you also manage to knock down three separate people on a street run (by throwing newspapers at them) you’ll gain access to the bonus stage where you can win extra subscribers. At the end of each neighbourhood is also a boss fight where you must down a persistent enemy by throwing newspapers at them.

Playing N64 Paperboy can be a little confusing at times – especially when it comes to aiming newspapers. Sometimes you want to flip sides and throw in the other direction, but you can’t do that. You don’t have full control over your movement around a street, so the game feels like it’s on-rails at times (which it is effectively). If you get into the rhythm of Paperboy, though, and the feel of the controls, then you might find a decent game inside what initially feels like a bit of a mess.

Although it might not look it, Paperboy on the N64 is actually not a bad game at all and is still worth playing today. Be prepared for a complete 2D to 3D make-over, though, but in this case it worked out well enough, even though the main character looks a bit weedy!