I played Paperboy 2 for the SNES when I was a kid. I was playing it again through totally legal means and thought about how excellently, this game tempts you with things to whip newspapers at.

Look at that, a baby and a suckling pig. If you hit that pig it goes running off and might kill you. That’s a death worth having by my estimations. You save the pig and he gets revenge on you. It’s actually good if you hit the baby because it stops flying down the street out of control. There are like half a dozen you have to avoid. Is there someone at the top of the street just whipping her sextuplets down the street.

Then you have this old folks having a precious moment. Just asking for you to hit them with a newspaper so that they kick their legs up. What’s one subscriber out of ten for that street when you get to do that? You can get them to sign up through word of mouth if you aren’t a shit to the other subscribers.

Then there’s this dude. Just one little hit to that jack… and boom. He dies. No one would know. This game might be turning me into a psychopath.

To be fair to the paperboy/girl you have to deal with this bullshit.

Look at a man just whipping tires into the open street. I would be on the other side of his house catching those tires to resell them.

Then there’s this bullshit of gargoyles that are constantly shooting fireballs. What is this neighborhood? But then again, maybe that house makes sense when we have…

Active hauntings!

And a fortress that’s opening fire I guess on the people across the street. What did the local zoning board have to say about the moat? And the cannons?

I couldn’t find a screenshot of it but there’s also a convenience store that’s getting robbed every day and the only one there to stop it is the paperboy/girl.

The fact of the matter is that this town should have a great deal of news regarding these weird neighborhoods. But I guess news is so slow in this town that the local hiring and firing of paperboys/girls makes front page news.

Anyway, to get to the point. This game fucking rules.