Full Preview: Postal 2: Share The Pain

Last edited by Santaduck on Tue Jan 18, 2005 8:47 pm; edited 3 times in total

POSTAL 2: SHARE THE PAIN EXTENDED PREVIEW

This game is a touchy one to review, in fact it’s a minefield. I served as part of the betatesting group for the OS X version of this upcoming game, and want to give readers a new perspective about this game that you may not read elsewhere. That said, I think the goal in this review is to explain what the game is about and what it’s not about, and readers can make their own informed guesses whether they will enjoy this game; the overall “star-rating” will be given according to if you buy seeking what this game is about. If you don’t want a game for these reasons, or if you feel even the remote chance you will be offended by the game, then ignore this rating.

PRECONCEIVED NOTIONS
In the broadest sense, this is a violent game, even among the first person shooter (FPS) genre, which by nature is violent. Parts of this game are meant to be offensive, or in “poor taste”. You’ve probably heard of some of the buzz about the existing PC version, good or bad. Time for a history lesson.

Violence of some form has been with video games from the commercial birth of the genre: shooters (Space Invaders), cute non-shooters (Pacman, DigDug, and Frogger come to mind), text games (Infocom titles such as Zork), and RPGs such as Ultima. We’re not used to thinking of these games as violent, not because of the fantasy element, but because of the disconnect with the “real world.” These games wouldn’t inspire you to go set a frog free on the interstate much as you wouldn’t be inspired to play tennis after plunking in some quarters for Pong.

The same standards apply in television and film—if the violence is disconnected from the real world, it can even be quite funny for young children, who for example, giggle at Wile E. Coyote being nearly killed again and again. This is why you won’t see kids imitating his Acme Anvil antics, but you will see kids imitating pro wrestlers, who are portrayed more realistically. For an older audience, a zombie film such as Peter “LOTR” Jackson’s Dead Alive with nonstop violence will garner an MPAA “R” rating, but a film with fewer, but more realistic scenes of cannibalism such as The Cook, The Thief, his Wife, & Her Lover will get the harsher “NC-17”—the MPAA even mentions “rotting fish and meat” for this film, something depicted so believably that it was deemed more potentially offensive to moviegoers than hundreds of consecutive graphic zombie dismemberments.

Why are we talking about the MPAA? Video game tech eventually became good enough that it could evoke violence and gore well enough to be objectionable. Acclaim’s Mortal Kombat and Sega CD’s Night Trap are often mentioned as the games that “broke the seal”—remember Nintendo’s self-censored MK that came after that firestorm? US Senator Joe Lieberman was leading an effort to regulate video game content, when the game industry wisely stepped in to self-regulate with the creation of the ESRB (Entertainment Software Ratings Board), which created a rating system directly modeled upon the MPAA’s.

The issues are slightly different around the world. In the United States the notion of protected free speech as it relates to both films and games is an issue, which is why many legislative efforts are directed toward regulating retailers, rather than the content creators themselves. In Europe, there are various decency standards that can be evoked with much the same result to ban advertising, shelf displays, and sales to minors, with Greek prohibitions being in the news this year. Other countries have their own demons. Germany has fought against neo-Nazi games such as Ethnic Cleansing, and Japan with sexually violent games within its Bishojo genre such as 177, and a docu-game from the UK has recently emerged entitled JFK: Reloaded.

LET’S TALK ABOUT POSTAL ALREADY
The original 3/4 top-down shooter Postal (1) from 1997 has the badge of honor of being one of several games mentioned specifically by Senator Lieberman in his efforts to regulate the gaming industry. It was a redneck shoot-em-all festival of violence, and the US Postal Service even tried to sue developer Running With Scissors (Because I suppose it’s difficult to imagine Lance Armstrong in a black trenchcoat and a shottie). The game garnered enough notoriety, and presumably sales, to enable RWS to produce a FPS version, which means there are recognizable characters and events in Postal 2 from Postal 1—but this is where the similarity ends.

Whereas the first Postal was fundamentally about gratuitous violence, P2 does not have violence at its core purpose. Certainly P2 inherits the legacy of the original (including the flaming marching band), and the game dishes up even more offensive content, but it is now also very smart. Although RWS creator Vince Desi may deny it, he must know this to be true in his odd little heart. The two new things that P2 gives us is 1) social satire everywhere, and 2) putting a magnifying glass on the videogame player himself (or herself).

The game is really about choices. There is a set of tasks to complete, but there is also a world in which to explore and interact. It’s almost like a FPS-Sims hybrid. Like the games Black & White and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, you can make choices on the allegorical sides of Good and Evil. Unlike those games however, in P2 it’s not a stark option that is provided merely to vary the game’s presentation of story or weapon options. Like the real world, you can be bad, or good, and… well… that’s it. You live with yourself.

The game is loaded full of real-world annoyances that we sit meekly though day after day. In P2, you go to the bank and get in line, and there’s a seemingly short line of people, but each one annoyingly spends an eternity deciding what they want to do, and it ends up being frustrating with the ring of truth: “I’d like to deposit. . ,” long pause, “. . . Forty. . . dollars,” well we just wait, again, and again. Hey we’re busy here: in this video game, do we wait, try to cut in front, kick people, or rob the bank instead? Do we find ourselves doing just enough to speed the process? You can do either, and it doesn’t really affect your future options later in the game… and I understand if you’re in a rush, you’re busy playing a video game! And the questions don’t end there because what do you do when real bank robbers storm in?

After reading this review, if you think this game will offend you, it most probably will, so don’t buy it, and it’s your own fault if you do… just like if you don’t like violent misogynistic movies, and you walk into the theatres to see Se7en or 8mm despite their “R” ratings. Hello, read the “M” rating, it really means something. However this game is seldom worse than what I’ve seen in “R” movies, and even in those cases, it’s because YOU as the gamer decided to make it worse. Choose your own adventure, choose your own rating.

POSTAL 2 AS THE THINKING MAN’S GAME
The game is uber-violent. Period. I wouldn’t casually hand this game to my own 12 year-old, hence the M rating, but neither would I take kids to see films rated to contain similar levels of violence: the ratings work. Like films, the ratings are meant to protect the consumer. If you know your limits, you can read the ratings and adjust your purchases. If you ignore the ratings, you will have only yourself to blame. This review is written under the full assumption that you understand the rating, and are still considering buying and enjoying the game.

Note that ESRB ratings show a trend in M-rated games, rising from 9% of the total number of console titles to about 12% (about 1 out of 8) this year, and I think the GTA games are now on sale at the usually-conservative Walmart. These are incredible numbers, and this niche market is not only here to stay but growing too. In fact P2 is the first game the ESRB has chosen for the descriptive sublabel, "Intense Violence." Although RWS’s Vince Desi thinks it’s ridiculous that playing games can affect actions in real life, I will admit that it may make you feel odd to step out into the real world after an hour or two spent in the alternate reality of Paradise, Arizona. I’d trust myself, but I wouldn’t ignore the label and hand the game to those kids practicing body slams off the roof into the backyard. M means M—got it?

RWS claims you can complete the game without killing, but such a strategy becomes nearly impossible in later levels on harder levels of play to the point that nonviolence is easily the most challenging mode of play—and even then the town will often be busy killing each other. Nonviolence on your part may literally be impossible on the hardest “They Hate Me” level where you start as a marked man—although Postal 2 modder Kamek has claimed to have done it, earning the game’s coveted “Thanks for playing, Jesus” rating with a lot of care and judicious use of the stun gun weapon.

One thing I will say however is that this game is not about sexual inappropriateness. You won’t find a romp with prostitutes as part of the story. At worst, P2 has the scantily-clad Postal Girls in MP, and overhearing some smalltalk among a group of Priests in SP.

Choose your own adventure: We talked about choice. It’s “realistic” in the sense that you have many options for antisocial behavior that we refrain from in real life, from a little to quite a lot. In P2, you can kick strange people, pull down your pants and walk around town, urinate on strangers (there is even a urination-related task which I won’t reveal for its sheer cheekiness), initiate shooting sprees in broad daylight, rob banks or doughnut shops, smoke “health pipes”, eat fast food for health… or you can make normal-looking pedestrians beg for their lives before decapitating them with a shovel, playing soccer with their head, and gibbing it with your stray-cat-topped shotgun when you’re done while bystanders have gathered to kick the headless corpse that you’re about to douse with gasoline then infect with an anthrax-laced cow head. There’s more, but you get the idea. You can also pick the target of your inappropriate behavior according to gender, race, weight, profession, religion, and sexual orientation—go ahead and offend yourself, but that says more about your private little world than about RWS, it’s not their fault for depicting a diverse group of NPCs. Don’t get distracted and stay with me: like I said before, this game really is not about displaying gore.

The interesting part is that you largely choose your own level of violence—if you let yourself get arrested, your character will say, “Don’t blame me, look at the kid behind the keyboard!” How true. The repercussions are yours alone, and you know what? I find it very interesting that at first, I found my own balance of what is “enough” to complete the game… and as the game went on, I became so accustomed to the fantasy world that eventually that my in-game standards of acceptable violence began to change—and that

is quite an insight in itself! And my preferences were interesting too: from the beginning I found myself always being nice to the dancing crazy drunk, and sanctimoniously opted toward vigilantism in response to the mugger in the alley.

Although the game has the opportunity to act out violence against police authorities (including tracking such violence specifically), even here there’s an interesting twist later in the game when you can impersonate police officers: When you’re in uniform and come upon other officers beating a gun-wielding pedestrian, do you just join in? Do you barge into the homes of strangers because you can? If a resident of the town walks up and calls you a “pig” to your face, do you walk away? Are you scared to wear the uniform when you visit the wrong side of the tracks?

Dark Humor. And that’s just it: The game isn’t about being violent, it’s about being bitingly funny, in dark ways that wink at reality and poke fun at you when you almost consider it normal. The bank, called “Fee of America,” has a gilt statue of a customer crushed under an oppressor’s heel with the logo “We Get Away with It, Because We Can.” There are billboards with cheerful graphics for life insurance with the headliner “Hey Kids! Your Parents are going to Die!” There are also numerous pokes at consumerism, so read the fine print, whether on meat menus or cigarette dispensers: “Cowboys don’t get Cancer.” Other billboards try to hype “Marmoset Basketball” (Huh? Exactly. Now go buy a jersey like everyone else.) Fashion displays at the mall are dead-on as they unsuccessfully try to manufacture hype, the video game arcade features “Sym Homeless,” your fast food “Coronary Burger” gives you health points, voting is worse than your worst Florida butterfly nightmare, guns are cheaper than your dry-cleaning bill, and the innocuously

termed “Health Pipe” gives you instant superhealth, but you pay a painful price later. Even the iMac is not spared if you look carefully.

The game also makes fun of certain activist groups, who eventually try to kill you, and these include concerned parents protesting against violent videogames. The activist humor here is less on-target, and certainly stems from RWS’s real-life trouble in Congress, but it does add to the overall mix.

Throw in a cosmopolitan ensemble of rednecks, priests, butchers, terrorists, protesters, bandies, gimps, cats, dogs, elephants, and fish finders, and there’s seemingly always a new joke around the corner to laugh about, or at least scratch your head. With

all of these jabs, you almost forget to consider how so many pedestrians are carrying a concealed weapon, and how almost every home has a gun on the nightstand, or worse, for protection.

GAMEPLAY
The game is set in a small American town in Paradise, Arizona, which is separated into different sections that are essentially separate “maps.” You can pull up a GPS-like map that shows your current position & orientation within Paradise. I have heard of intolerably long load times between these maps on the original unpatched Postal 2 for

Windows, but that has long since been fixed and here it’s been optimized to an average of about 8 seconds on my SP G5 1.8, plus 2 more seconds if auto-save is enabled. The autosave is a nice feature to turn on, because if you die, then you can restart from your last map transition, otherwise you’re limited to one of 10 manual save slots, or starting over. The town is populated by an array of NPCs who are capable of talking to you, shooting at you, fleeing from you while screaming in terror, vomiting in disgust, or just walking on by and talking with one another.

You have various tasks to complete each day, which involve going to different parts of Paradise. These tasks range from picking up your paycheck, getting signatures for a survey, going holiday shopping for a moderately obscene doll with a 'tude, or getting Gary Coleman’s autograph, and much of the humor of the story unfolds as you attempt to complete these tasks. However you can cheerfully ignore the script and just explore the town in a Sim-like experience for as long as you like. The game is nonlinear in the sense that you can detour all you want, but if you complete all of the tasks on your checklist for the day, you move to the next day with a new list of tasks, and find new areas of the town open for access.

Weapons and Items: You have two inventories, one for weapons, and one for nonweapons, and the HUD displays the active item of each, as well as your health. The “Fire” key activates your selected weapon, and the “Use” key does the same for nonweapons. Weapons from small to large include: kicking, baton, shovel, stun gun, pistol, shotgun, machine gun, rifle, napalm launcher, rocket launcher, WMD, as well as missle weapons such as grenades, Molotovs, and disease-ridden Cow heads. Importantly, you can hide your weapons to appear innocent so that police & pedestrians alike don’t preemptively attack you on sight, even for “running with scissors.” Once you anger police, they seemingly communicate via radio so you will be on their lookout list for a period of time after an altercation with any officer. They will try to arrest you peacefully, but the national guard will immediately attempt to kill you if provoked. Pedestrians will sometimes defend themselves, and sometimes run, according to the difficulty setting, as will denizens of homes and businesses you may invade. Items include food and smoking pipes (for health), money, dog biscuits, catnip, cats, fish finders, as well as the GPS map mentioned above and task-related objects such as books and parking tickets. Many items have dual uses (fish finder, catnip, cats, autographed book, doughnuts), so always try to experiment to discover the game’s secrets. One of the hardest items to get is the Chompy plugin to your fishfinder, a useful game-within-a-game, usually placed in locations even harder to reach than the rocket launchers, so be prepared to walk on ledges, roofs, and even power lines.

Although there are a variety of weapons, the choice seems to boil down to attempting a shotgun headshot at close range, or careful pistol work at long range. The machine gun simply doesn’t do enough damage, gasoline can be too cumbersome to select in a sudden melee without weapon-specific keybinding, and the grenades are difficult to be used effectively in single player, although in multiplayer, the alt-fire mode to drop “traps” can be strategic. Sometimes fiery weapons such as napalm and Molotovs are extremely useful in crowded melees because opponents on fire generally stop attacking you as they run around in panic, and if you catch yourself on fire, well, there’s a logical way to get yourself doused with a natural flame-retardant fluid if you just look carefully at your controls. Occasionally you’ll be lucky enough to get the military grade rocket launcher or a cartoonishly-caricatured WMD device (which laughingly looks like a giant lit cigarette), but I found these weapons weren’t directly related to completing tasks. There are also some odd tricks, like putting away your weapon and kicking police, who will then stop shooting at you, while you run to a map transition as they peacefully try to arrest you with a baton. The sniper rifle takes too long to unscope and is, with few exceptions, rarely useful unlike snipers from dedicated semirealism FPSs. For that matter, realism in the weaponry is not the point here either: you can carry all weapons and items somewhere under your trenchcoat, while guns don’t have the bother of clips & reloading—your ammo count just rises or falls, UT-style, as does your bladder.

DID THE REVIEWER LIKE THE GAME, AND SHOULD THE READER BUY IT?
Well this is why most people would read a review. The answer depends on what you’re looking for. This game has garnered both “best” and “worst” awards. I’ll say it again: if you think you’ll be offended, stay away and consider this game a 0. Also there are tons of FPS games out there, so you can just pick and choose the one you want based on your interests, and Postal 2 may or may not fit. Do you want a semi-realism FPS? Get a Tom Clancy title or for multiplayer quit Counterstrike today (not available on a Mac anyways) and install the Frag.Ops or StrikeForce mods for UT2004. You can also choose a WWII game (Battlefield 1942), a franchise-themed single-player with storyline (Elite Force), or a fantastic-looking one (Alice). If you want a strategic fragging game with a well-tested and balanced multiplayer mode with a large online community, then of course go for Unreal Tournament 2004. Regarding Postal 2, hopefully you’ve gotten some idea of what this game is about-- this game will bring you to a place unlike any other game on the market, GTA included. If you’re looking for a unique experience in a unique world that no other FPS comes close to providing, Postal 2 delivers, so read on. Let me also go through the laundry list of considerations you may have: Performance, Singleplayer, and Multiplayer.

PERFORMANCE: On a technical level, the game does not take full advantage of the Unreal (Warfare) engine. This isn’t what the game is about, but it certainly looks good enough and is competent enough that any shortcomings didn’t bother me in the least. If you want to know about the warts here’s a description: Textures are sometimes obviously stretched (as on the hills bordering Paradise) and sometimes tile at distance on building surfaces, and the maps are not airtight, strewn with places you can become trapped. This occurs so often that the game recognizes this and states, “Looks like you’re stuck, stay out of there!” as it gently nudges you out of the problem area. I even found one place to fall out of the map entirely, but you won’t find these problems unless you’re systematically looking for such trouble. If you leave an area of town through a map transition, then later return, most powerups you have taken are still gone, but any mayhem you may have wreaked is undone, though I didn’t find it interfered with my enjoyment of the town. There are a variety of stock NPC models, but they are recognizably recycled (even the faces) in roles such as police and pedestrians. True lag is rare, even in big shooting sprees, which is a good thing. The exception was when excessively lighting Gasoline across half the map.

The maps themselves seem very nicely optimized for the purpose of framerates, with fast zones cordoning the indoors, and the outdoors cut with (probably) antiportaled hills that were perfect for the Arizona atmosphere. A few maps had high poly areas, but these were nicely cordoned off from other portions of the map with what were presumably zone-portaled tunnels. If the individual maps were a bit more combined, with correspondingly fewer map transitions, that would have been slightly more convenient, but it’s a small quibble—I would guess that optimization techniques become less applicable if the maps become larger, and besides I liked how the maps didn’t just section the town into a simple grid pattern. Distance fog, if enabled, is well-implemented and its chosen color actually adds natural atmosphere to the simmering desert air of the town. All in all, a game can look look better, but play much worse. Postal gets the priorities straight and pays attention to fun textures on signs, buildings, and vending machines, and the maps play smoothly without lag, and that’s pretty nice in my book.

I was happy playing on a iMac G5 1.8 (with built-in 64M GeForce FX 5200) at highest texture detail settings (and other settings at default) at 1024x768, with about 45 FPS indoors, and about 35 outdoors, depending on the poly count at that location. I even ran it on a 500Mhz G4 with a 64M Radeon 9000Pro at 800x600, although here I had to set all of the settings to the lowest setting—such as texture detail, extra bystanders, decals, corpses, distance fog, smoke, ragdoll physics, etc., and found that I could play with about 15-20 FPS indoors at best (in small rooms) to about 10-15 FPS outdoors—I didn’t play the game through on this slowish G4, but I would guess I would hit lag at some of the larger firefights, but I would also guess that the majority of the SP game would be playable and enjoyable, while preserving the overall feel & atmosphere—obviously running around at an average 12 FPS is at the extreme borderline of playability, but I wanted to give an idea of the extreme minimum. In a day and age where new Mac releases seem to require the latest DP G5, the system requirements (see bottom) are a welcome relief. Whatever rig you have, you can adjust a variety of these performance parameters suit your CPU & graphics card, and there’s even a wizard to do the guesswork for you.

The one highlight of this game is karma, or physics. The way that automobiles explode into the air is breathtakingly fun, but even random objects such as postal dropboxes, office hardware, and carcasses can be kicked around and thrown by explosions, giving an extra feel to the in-game violence. Carcass physics is continuously calculated and does not become static after the initial fall has been arrested. Water physics such as splashing and dripping is also done with particular attention to detail in a wide variety of situations, although I found one case (when the character is ill) where decals floating in midair near the surfaces could result. The one odd thing is how some inventory objects don’t want to sit too closely to each other on the ground, causing for example cute hopping lunchbags and doughnuts when you drop your objects intentionally, or when you die, but this was kind of charming. I have a thing for animated foodstuffs I guess.

SINGLE PLAYER MODE: I must explain and emphasize that despite these minor issues, I really got drawn into the creepy simmering open-air atmosphere of Paradise, Arizona. This is a review, and I noticed these things, but they didn’t impinge at all on the issues of why I would buy this game, and why I would enjoy it on those terms. I loved how the settings varied from suburban houses (some in multilevel terraced neighborhoods), to trainyards and forested parks, to indoors of buildings ranging from malls, restaurants, factories, and warehouses. The voice acting was realistically done, something that can’t be taken for granted when ingame speech ranges from retail service, to orders from angry policemen and policewomen and random pedestrians screaming or sobbing—I certainly don’t have this game turned up high enough that the neighbors can hear. Upon first playing, I didn’t go looking for mapbugs nor the technicalities of texture mapping and skinning. I loved the town, and it looked right, felt right, and most importantly it played right. It brought me to somewhere I’ve never been before in a FPS, somewhere that at first glance is entirely ordinary because it hits so close to home—I’ve already talked about these clever details, but that doesn’t convey the sense of having fallen into some alternate universe where you can’t really tell where the jokes end and sober reality begins. Bravo to the game devs, this is the heart of what they were trying to achieve, and they were successful.

This feeling continues through the multiple days of tasks in singleplayer mode, and to be honest I wanted to have more, and there was. There are areas of the town which don’t directly impact your tasks, but do contain their own stories, and even an elaborate hidden base of terrorists just under our noses—again it’s not politically correct to parody Islamic terrorists, but it’s a satisfying and extensive 3 map set of alternate reality (waiting with both firefights and Super Mario-like walkthrough puzzles) that taps into our worst post 9/11 fears to an extent that I’ll bet most people that play this game will simply accept this religion-driven racism as reality. Bingo. They are making fun of society as they poke fun at the gamer, often in ways that I’m sure many people just looking for violent gaming will never realize.

As the game progresses, I believe most players will be able to easily imagine their home towns, like Paradise, Arizona, crawling with military units as a true vision of what may some day be true in real life—I think we’ve all seen the recent transformation of our airports into a places guarded by assault rifles, and we know our precious suburbia could be next—and when all hell breaks loose at the end of the game and the town (and even the sky) goes mad, I think you’ll feel a little bit sad that the world has come to this and gone to hell, because by then you end up caring in a funny way about the town. And besides, in all the mayhem, you have now been regulated to ordinariness: the only one who has a right to go postal is you, right?

SINGLEPLAYER REPLAY VALUE: You can choose the level of difficulty in singleplayer mode, from police armed with shovels instead of guns, to a world where every pedestrian is a sharpshooter armed to the teeth, and the police are already looking to shoot you on sight. After you complete the game, even on an easy setting, the game unlocks an Enhanced mode that gives you weapons earlier as well as some extra options and flaming bodily functions. It also gives you access to Cheat modes, including standard stocks of weaponry and powerups, but also some creative new weapon options such as ricocheting cats (yes cats). I didn’t feel immediately compelled to try to finish the game again to the end with the bar set at a harder difficulty level, so replay value does not really come from here. I do occassionally find myself exploring different ways of interacting with the town, and I’m more and more tempted to try to finish the game with a zero bodycount. For replay value, the game is also famously full of secrets, both real and falsely-rumored. I have found subterranean zombie dogs, the exploding shed, the secret terrorist levels (Tora Bora), gotten into the Hannibal Lechter cell, and found two ways to bargain with Krotchy (“don’t touch me there”) peacefully… I’ve seen Gary Coleman in jail, found the vent tunnels and an attic arena in the mall, and seen truly odd religious motifs in the church and cult compound—additionally there are less reliable but persistent rumors of a red Rocky Robe, red turtles, human zombies, and even a Bigfoot. When searching for these secrets, I used the console cheat codes posted on various websites to choose your day of the week (I also discovered the console command: “set postaldude health 9999”). Finally, the Windows side has been awaiting a long overdue SP extension called Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend, and I would have to guess that this will make it over to Mac & Linux as well, and when it does, I will be first in line on release day. This extension has been rumored to be more a member of the pure slasher genre (in a hellish zombie theme no less), so these rumors have disappointed fans of the “choose your own adventure” school.

MULTIPLAYER: Running with Scissors is very good at listening to their fans. (If you wish to brave their expletive-ridden forums, you can speak your mind too.) After Postal 2 was released for Windows, the self-published “Share the Pain” patch addressed the demand for multiplayer, an option that couldn’t be included in the original due to time constraints. Some singleplayer weapons code couldn’t be practically converted to the Epic multiplayer system, so a few weapons such as the WMD, napalm, and gasoline have been left out—however the cow head made the cut. There’s even a charmingly cartoonish 1337 text bubble

(“OMG!11”) in lieu of a in-game talk animation. Anyhow, the result was a system with four game modes: DM, TDM, “Snatch” (a CTF game with ‘Postal Babes’), and an odd “collect all the money bags” mode called “Grab” that inspires images of the Santa Claus toy satchel. There were no servers close to my IP, so I couldn’t critically test a truly “close” server with low ping, but network code seemed nicely optimized with no severe latency or poly lag issues, even when dealing with flames from Molotovs.

All modes are fully compatible with servers running the current Windows 'Share The Pain' version (1409). There are 11 maps for the DM/TDM/Grab modes, as well as 4 maps which I must say have been superbly designed for “Snatch.” All feature the Postal Babes dancing at the end of the map to heavy breathing.

Grab was the odd one out. About 10 money bags are scattered around the map and it is your job to collect them all, or to have the most when time runs out. Dropped bags eventually respawn at their original locations. Interestingly, your weapon damage increases as you get more money bags—because more players will be after you, you will be able to better defend yourself. A radar in the HUD shows the location of all the bags, players, and players with bags, although the radar can be a bit confusing in multilevel maps where you are either above or below the bag. Players in front of you with money bags will rendered holding a bag slewn behind the shoulders, a visual that grows with the number of actual bags. The bot AI doesn’t have the bots actually try to get bags, and I didn’t see any Grab servers online, so this game mode was a bit of a loss. It was an interesting concept, and perhaps could be playable with more limited weapons (such as the shovel-only mod), but even so it also didn’t really jive with the spirit of the SP concept-- I can see why there were no servers, or clan ladders for this mode.

TDM & DM. TDM is played not by colors, but by fun team skins, such as “Gimps” vs. “The Band”. To me the DM mode is a bit pointless, although I saw both DM and TDM servers online—If you’re into straight every-man-for-himself DM, why not play a game with a true multiplayer emphasis such as Quake or Unreal instead? Besides the weapons seem even more unbalanced in MP than in SP, with two weapons being essential: the shotgun headshot is the most useful strategy, since it can be a one-shot kill that bypasses Kevlar (which protects only the chest), and the rocket launcher is a noobstick that can be used for fragwhoring to the extent that there are servers advertised as “no-rocket.” The Molotovs can be useful to stop someone from shooting at you as they try to extinguish themselves, but are rarely good for a frag. Like singleplayer, only the alt-fire version of grenades are useful, either to set traps of multiple grenades for a one-touch frag, or to throw at a player hoping for a direct hit and explosion; however you will not get credit for frags if you yourself have been fragged since setting your trap. I learned the hard way that clanners slumming in public servers will deviously set multiple grenade traps in a single location for a one-trip kill, for example behind a door; you can shoot these traps to detonate them if they block a key passage. Compared to the rapid fragging of the shotgun and rocket launcher, lesser weapons such as the scissors, machinegun (even with sputter or burst firing), batons, and shovels are irrelevant, as is the pistol except in the unlikely event you become skilled in headshotting outside of shotgun range by leading the latency (ping) typical in all online play.

The most noticeable omission here is that there is no default high-damage close-range weapon of last resort similar to the impact hammer of UT or the combat knife of semirealism games, so if you can’t find a shotgun and ammo fast in a crowded server, you’re a goner. That said, I found that I can play TDM with some satisfaction, but very soon I’d rather be playing vanilla Unreal TDM due to the weapon balancing issues… the real MP highlight is “Snatch.”

Snatch. Think CTF with the Postal Girls in place of the flags. If the un-PC nature of this mode’s premise doesn’t offend you, then the gameplay itself is actually satisfying even in comparison to full-on Quake or Unreal CTF. The bot AI works, but the real highlight is playing this mode on multiplayer. This is because the four default Snatch maps are very well multi-pathed, in particular the canyoned Ponderous, and all lend themselves well to team strategy and the well-chosen placement of grenade traps. Someone paid very close attention to the playability factor of these maps, and it shows… and of course the concept itself is right in-line with the irreverence of the SP concept, even the audio and the hilariously deadpan announcer. In this mode, the appearance of the Postal Girls at the end of the round makes sense, although the finishing player (of the final capture) was always mysteriously deleted from view. I was also thinking that if RWS came out with a UT2004 Snatch CTF mutator as a promotional device, it would become an instant hit among clanservers, since the theme would serve the target demographic of male teens (or teens at heart) quite well.

Clanning. Yes, Postal clans do exist. The clanners I have run into online have directed me to www.postalleague.com, where they compete in 4-on-4 TDM and 5-on-5 Snatch, in what looks to be solely a North American ladder. Like any game, serious clanners know every in & out of each map—I was brought on a tour of MP map secrets and bugs, being shown that I could walk into and hide in any of the larger tree trunks, mountainclimb myself off the map in Ponderous, or electrocute people standing too close to the radio tower in Trainyard by shooting its microwave dish. One player also showed me his Pele-inspired soccer skills, repeatedly kicking a rocket launcher over his head for over a minute. He then proceeded to do the same to me, and could even kick me off the map into oblivion—the trick works if the kickee is falling from a jump, while the kicker executes a jump-kick. I even have an animated screenshot of an inventory explosion of lunchbags from a church ledge here.

There are official servers that run the various game modes, but there is also a thriving community of custom content including some maps converted from singleplayer maps, a 1-on-1 arena mutator, and a notable mod called AirMail by Kamek, which drops a variety of airmail packages all over the map—each package is a truly creative powerup in the hilarious spirit of the original game (there are over 25 different varieties), and can renew the TDM experience. IMHO Kamek should be tapped by RWS for future installments of the Postal franchise. I didn’t see any client-side tracking mutators similar to “zeroping”, such as would be useful for the “instant projectile” weapons like the pistol or machinegun. Check out postalnetwork.org for more on customizing P2. I wouldn’t clan for this game myself, not by a long stretch, but I’d be very happy to see more Snatch servers online, something that may be likely when the online population spikes when the Mac & Linux versions are released. I’ve also been told that dedicated server applications will also become available for these platforms.

WHAT THE GAME IS ABOUT, WHAT IT IS NOT ABOUT
Before we get any further, let’s talk about why you would play this game. If you want a fully balanced MP mode with a huge online population at the ready, or if you want a visual tour-de-force peppered with even more outrageous cinematics that presage the next generation of video game effects, look elsewhere. If I were to rate the game on these aspects, it wouldn’t score well. But I’m assuming you wouldn’t be considering buying the game for these reasons. Instead, the single player mode and its story, evocative town, dark humor, choices, and insight are more of a reason to buy this game as the hyped violence. It won’t take you months to explore and finish the game, but you will get a truly unique visit to a world unlike any other in the FPS realm—it’s not a fantasy/sci-fi universe, nor is it a military ops simulation—it’s everyday America, a simalucrum of a small town in Arizona that is believable because it constantly hits close to home and the real-world everywhere you look.

What you get for buying this game is something no other game provides: a masterpiece of a visit to a

disturbing world unlike any other you’ve seen yet (Postal 1 included), disturbing because of its very familiarity, and one that makes you think long after you’ve played the game, about how you chose to play it, and yes, enjoy playing it that way. In this regard, GTA doesn't even come close.

It is along these lines that I give Postal 2: Share the Pain four stars out of five. I will say yet once again, read the review and if you think you’ll be offended, or you just want a different kind of game, ignore this rating. Believe it or not, it’s like an art house film… like Tarantino’s movies, it’s not about the killing, but about exploring who the killers are… when surrounded by cookie cutter Hollywood blockbusters or just-another-gun FPSs, oddly enough, it may take either a jaded connoisseur, or a maladapted teen who doesn’t even see the social satire, to appreciate this game.

The last we have heard, Postal 2 is now gold for OS X. There is no word yet on a release date or official system requirements. The dog is the RWS mascot “Champ,” who is depicted in the game, and is pictured above on his 4th birthday.

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UPDATE Dec 8, 2004: Postal 2:STP Released

Running With Scissors has announced that the P2:STP is now available for sale at the RWS online store.

Hardware Requirements:

(Minimum requirements)
MacOS X 10.2.8 or higher
700MHz G3 processor or faster
256MB RAM
2 gigs hard disk space
32MB ATI Radeon or Nvidia GeForce 2 or better

(Recommended requirements)
MacOS X 10.3.5 or higher
1GHz G4 processor or faster
512MB RAM
2 gigs hard disk space
64MB ATI Radeon 9000 or Nvidia GeForce 3 or better

Links:
Official Postal Site
Macologist Postal 2 Downloads
Macologist Interview with Ryan Gordon
Macologist Interview with Vince Desi

Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2004 5:59 am Post subject:

OK I have one small admission and a retraction to make. After playing Grab mode in the Postal 2 Demo multiplayer (with actual players, not bots), I've decided it's really fun. If everyone knows what they're doing and where the bags are, it can get quite hectic in the end. I love it, for some maps at least. Maybe I'll put up a dedicated retail server some times.