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.