Paperboy

Paperboy is a 1985 arcade game by Atari Games, originally developed in 1984. Players take on the role of a paperboy who delivers newspapers on his bicycle in a suburban street. The game has been ported to numerous video game consoles and personal computers. The version for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was the first NES game developed in the United States, and the version for the Sega Master System was the first SMS game developed in the United Kingdom. Paperboy was innovative because of its theme and novel controls. GAME: The player controls a paperboy on a bicycle who delivers newspapers to a suburban street shown in a cabinet perspective (or oblique projection). The player tries to deliver daily newspapers to subscribers for a week, tries to wreak havoc on the homes of non-subscribers, and must avoid hazards on the street. You lose subscribers if you miss a delivery or damage a subscriber's house. The game starts with a choice of difficulty levels: Easy Road, Medium Road and Hard Road. The object of the game is to perfectly deliver newspapers to subscribers for an entire week and avoid an accident (which counts as one of the player's lives) before the week ends. The game lasts seven game days, from Monday to Sunday. The player controls the paperboy with the handlebar controls and tries to deliver the newspapers to subscribers. Each day begins with an overview of the street, showing subscribers and non-subscribers. In the level itself, the houses of subscribers and non-subscribers are also easily recognizable: Subscribers live in light houses and non-subscribers live in dark houses. Delivering the newspapers The newspaper boy starts his route at the beginning of the street (at the bottom of the screen) and moves towards the end. The player can control the speed of the paperboy, but the paperboy is constantly moving and cannot stop moving forward until the level (the day of the week) is finished. If he slows down or stops for more than a few seconds, a swarm of bees will appear (arcade version only). For each newspaper delivered to a subscriber's mailbox, the player receives 250 points. When the newspaper is delivered to the subscriber's front door, the player receives 100 points. The points are multiplied x2 if you play the "Middle Way" and x3 if you play the "Hard Way". You get points for breaking plants, walking over flowers, or throwing newspapers into the windows of non-subscribers' houses. In Paperboy, the player tries to deliver newspapers to subscribers along a suburban street. The main objective of the game is to have as many subscribers as possible and stay alive. Secondary objectives include vandalizing houses of non-subscribers and hitting nuisances with newspapers. Keeping subscribers is fairly simple: the player must deliver a newspaper to them. The player can deliver more than one newspaper to each customer, but he/she must be careful not to accidentally damage customers' houses, for example by throwing a newspaper through a window. If you deliver a newspaper directly to a customer's newspaper box (or mailbox, as the spokesperson calls it), you get bonus points. If you accidentally damage a customer's house or fail to deliver a newspaper, the customer cancels his subscription and may trap the paperboy the next day. In advanced rounds, the homeowner may chase the paperboy immediately after the house is damaged. The player must stay alive by avoiding obstacles that appear on the road. Obstacles include everyday annoyances like fire hydrants, gutters, breakdancers, cars, skateboarders, drunks, kids with radio-controlled toys, and even rather bizarre enemies like a tornado, oversized house cats, and even the Grim Reaper himself. The player must also successfully cross street intersections (which gets harder every day). Some obstacles can earn the player bonus points. For example, the break dancer and some men fighting in the street can be "hit" with a newspaper to get extra points. If you crash your bike into one of the obstacles, you lose a life. There are two types of collisions possible when hitting obstacles: "%#@*!" and "SMACK!" The former occurs when you collide with obstacles that are an integral part of the landscape, such as fire hydrants, fences, and signposts. The second type of collision occurs with obstacles that are not part of the landscape: Cars, people, dogs, and bees. Along the way, the paperboy may collect additional bundles of newspapers because he can only carry a limited number of newspapers. These are sometimes located in hard-to-reach places. You get a "Perfect Delivery" when you successfully deliver to all current subscribers. For each house that is delivered, you get double bonus points. Also, a lost subscriber will be recovered - up to a maximum of 10 out of the 20 houses that are subscribers. If a "Perfect Delivery" is achieved while the player already has 10 subscribers, there will still be double bonus points, but no more su