Poster Paster is a unique game from Bridlington-based Taskset, first published for the C64 in 1984. It stars player character “Bill Stickers“, who must paste up posters for a living.

Bill is constantly being pestered by enemies, though, and touching any of them leads to instant death. To protect himself, Bill can flick paste off his brush at enemies, but the paste must be of the right consistency, otherwise it won’t stick. If it’s too runny, it won’t stick. And if it’s too hard, it won’t stick either. So maintaining a good paste consistency is a good idea, which you do by stirring your paste bucket every once in a while. A text indicator at the top of the screen tells you what your current paste consistency is (“PCG” means Paste Consistency Gauge – and it can be: Paste, Runny, Gooey, Lumpy, Solid, Thick or Water). “PPB” means Poster Paster Bonus is a bonus that can be won by not wasting rolls.

As Bill, you must climb your ladder and figure out which piece goes where too, because you can’t complete a level unless you paste the poster pieces into the correct places.

A tip for figuring this game out is to look at the boxes in your roll case. Each circle corresponds to a roll and its position on the board. To pick up the top left roll, point the tip of your yellow brush at the top left box and press fire. You’ll then pick up the roll for the top left position on the poster. And so on, but don’t forget that your roll case shows you where you should put each roll, so use it as a guide. You also need to be precise where you point the paintbrush. The tip of it needs to be inside each tiny box before you press fire. If you pick up the wrong roll, adjust your ladders (yeah, good luck with that) and try to paste it in the correct place.

The hardest part of the game, I found, was actually moving the ladder. Having to grab it by being in the right place and pressing fire is infurating. Even with practise it’s hard to get right. I really struggled with it for some reason…

There have been some notable hacks of Poster Paster on the C64 recently, with new features and levels, and they’re all fun to play still:
2013 +36D version by Hacksoft
2018 cartridge version by Jaws
2020 +5DGH version by ROLE

More: Poster Paster on CSDb
More: Poster Paster on c64-wiki.com