THE SPECTRUM GAMES DATABASE



PAPERBOY



PUBLISHER

Elite



AUTHOR

Unknown



YEAR

1985



CATEGORY

Arcade conversion



DESCRIPTION

Amusing scrolling shoot/avoid-em-up with a suburban twist!



CONTROLS

Keyboard (Q,A,O,P,SPACE), Kempston, Sinclair, Cursor



INSTRUCTIONS

You are the Paperboy and must deliver the newspaper to your

customers on a daily basis. Being set in the USA, this entails

riding your bike down a different street every day, throwing

newspapers into the mailboxes or onto the doorsteps of your

subscribers. If a person doesn't get his paper, he'll cancel his

subscription - and no subscriptions means no job!



Papers can be handy for other things though.... There are various

obstacles in your way which will try to knock you off you bike.

A well-aimed newspaper makes a handy weapon against these

hazards! Also, there's no harm in encouraging people who don't

subscribe to your paper to think again about their decision -

whack a few papers through their windows for extra points! And

while you're at it, why not aim a few at their bird tables and

dustbins? Or ride your bike over their flower beds? Mind you

don't run out of papers though! You can only carry ten at a time,

but supplies are left at various points along your route for you

to pick up.



You are given a number of lives to complete as many days as

possible.  You lose a life if anything knocks you off your bike,

but the game will end immediately should you run out of

subscribers! Get to the end of the day and you can complete an

assault course for extra points!





INLAY CARD TEXT

I don't have this handy, can anyone fill in?



CHEATS

POKE 50495,201 to become invincible

POKE 49263,0   for infinite papers

POKE 50577,190 for infinite lives



SEQUELS/PREQUELS

Paperboy 2 was released by Mindscape (I think) many years later.

It's not as good.



SCORES RECEIVED

Unknown, but quite good. Not classic status, though.



URL

ftp://ftp.nvg.unit.no/pub/sinclair/snaps/games/unsorted/p/pape

rboy.zip

ftp://ftp.nvg.unit.no/pub/sinclair/snaps/games/unsorted/p/papr

boy2.zip



GENERAL FACTS

You can tell which houses are subscribers and which aren't

without remembering them from the map at the start of the level.

Houses which are subscribers look light, and houses which aren't

subscribers look dark. Check out the windows!



The high score table features a border effect! This looks like

a set of handlebars and is pretty good. Unfortunately, it only

works properly on a REAL 48k Spectrum. On the emulators or any

128k machine, it looks all skewed and horrid.



The original Atari arcade machine had a real set of handlebars

on the from which you used to steer the Paperboy. The Speccy

version doesn't attempt to emulate this (you'll be pleased to

hear).



NOTES

Not a bad conversion, but not amazing. I still come back to play

this occasionally, so I guess it's stood the test of time pretty

well. 

