Postal: Brain Damaged

 Apocalypse yesterday

The Steam Next fest is here, and that means we've all been treated to a smattering of demos for upcoming independent, small publisher and just all around smaller titles that don't usually get the spotlight like this. Now is the time for the unsung backbone of the video games industry to lay down the fruits of their labour and pick up fans amidst those that typically would never give these games a second or third look. Forget Playstation's loaded sales tagline, this event is about the games! (Oh wait, they say 'for the players' don't they? Ah well, same difference) I love this event, I really do. Because there's no greater feeling then bumping into that little diamond in the rough, that uncut gem (trademark) which you absolutely must stick on the old wishlist. And then there's just getting the chance to see fledging developers strut their stuff and see those early cogs of game design work in these debut titles. What's not to love?

I've been pretty scattergun this year, flying through the list of available demos and picking up anything that even captures a whiff of my eye and the results have been... underwhelming to utterly overwhelming. Yes, I've scored the gambit this time and there's more than one game going on my radar for the long haul, because I need to see what becomes of them. For some games however, like the one which is the focus of this blog, my attraction was to a familiar name that I knew to be safe. Just in case everything else failed me, I knew that this would be game well worth my time. And it makes for a poetic follow up considering I was just talking about this series on the blog recently, completely unaware that this demo was coming up. (Despite actually seeing it advertised during E3. I don't always pay attention, okay?) Thus it's time to talk once again about the Black Eyed Peas' favourite franchise: Postal.

'Postal: Brain Damaged' sounds like it promises to continue that once abandoned story thread from the end of the very first game where it was revealed that Postal Dude was actually inside of a psychiatric hospital for the entire duration of the story. Which is curious, considering Postal II specifically modelled a gravestone commemorating the death of Postal's storyline in a pretty clear promise that they weren't going to go there anymore. I guess alternatively this could be a direct follow-up to the end of Postal II wherein Postal Dude (spoilers) shoots himself in the head in order to stop listening to his wife, but we already know the direct events following that was a nuclear strike on Paradise and a whole bunch of stupid insane nonsense which blurs the line between the already warped reality of Postal and the extra warped hallucinations incurred by the gunshot. Or maybe this is a total stand-alone, I don't know and I honestly don't even know if it matters at this point.

The developers have used this thinly established premise to finally do away with the veneer of a storyline attached to the Postal games and achieve the series' ultimate form, they've turned it into a first person shooter. (or 'Boomer Shooter', as I'm just discovering is a genre title) Postal games have always juggled the open world exploration with the ultra violence, when deep down we all knew there was a DOOM clone hiding beneath the skin. What, you didn't know that? Well to be honest neither did I. But I do now and it fits the series a little too well. Plus, with the addition of the 'brain damage' plot element, it allows for the team to throw together so trippy level designs that aren't tethered to some degree of reality, fully embracing the Boomer Shooter aesthetic. (Hmm, not sure I like that Sub genre name, truth be told. Maybe it'll grow on me.)

Visually, you can see that Brain Damaged is built using that same faux-PS1 aesthetic that has blown up in the indie horror circles of late, almost as much as 3d backgrounds and 2d sprites has for the platforming scene. Obviously this has the effect of being unsettling and unworldly, as well as facilitating a lot more cartoonish action and gore then perhaps even the base Postal games can pull off for a more action leaning affair. Along with the style comes a gameplay set-up very much akin to DOOM, wherein you sprint around at highspeeds collecting guns and killing everything that gets in your way, with the Postal twist being in the fact that most of NPCs around the map are civilians who scream and run away from you, and the rest are old men with shotguns, murderous dogs or fat children floating on balloons. So is formed Postal's characteristic committal to vague wishy-washy commentary on... I guess this one is meant to be modern Suburbia. (Cutting.)

But whereas everything about the presentation is purposely designed to scream 'old school', the gameplay actually borrows from modern day shooters in order to not drive the fans insane. For one, we have that slide which every game post Far Cry 3 is forced to have under fear of total ostracization, as well as couple of movement options directly stol- I mean 'borrowed', from DOOM Eternal. I'm talking about the meat hook, a hook on the shotgun which drags you towards enemies so that you can blast them into gibbets up close. They've also borrowed the floating rings around the map that the hook can attach to in order to provide some aerial verticality to the exploration, although Postal does try to make it more 'them' by making them 'anal rings'. (Although I had to be told that in order to see it. Not sure if anyone on the team has ever seen an actual anal ring before.)

The actual raw gameplay loop here, shooting and running around collecting armour and health items, is actually decently solid. That surprise in my tone comes from experience playing other Postal games where the shooting was 'meh', and you were really around for the irreverent novelty. Now without that novelty, the team on the job have done a fine job stitching together a working shooter and one that I can really see myself having some mindless entertainment with in the long game. It's actually quite a lot of fun to go on an unprompted rampage through the town, ducking and weaving between flying hamburgers and shotgun buck, launching myself in the air with a meat hook before spraying urine down on my enemies. Oh right, you can still piss on people, because this is a Postal game and some things are just sacred. (Couldn't find a 'kick' button, however. But I guess the motor-powered Chain-spade did the job just fine.)

My only concerns coming away from the demo was the fact that the first level didn't have a boss encounter at the end, which very well could have been because it was exorcised from the demo or because that's the style of game design they're going for. (I hope it's the former, because I adore bosses in these sorts of games.) Also, the level design got samey fast, and I had a few moments of "Okay, where the heck did I come from and where am I going?" Which I feel might be a bit of the point of adopting both the PS1 style and the suburbia 'cloned houses' theme, but that doesn't take away from that feeling of being frustrated and lost because some places are too similar. Aside from those small gripes, however, Postal: Brain Damaged seems like an exciting little project that I wouldn't mind throwing twenty five buck down for if that's the pricing model they're shooting for. (I'm only guessing as much, no one's said yet) Nothing earth shattering, but a decent time waster, which somewhat works as a review of the entire Postal franchise, I guess.

Postal II

Somehow less cringe than Saints Row 3

Games that scrape the very edges of taste are hardly a new invention conjured out of the sky, and before the likes of 'Hatred' and 'Ra-' actually I'm not going to write the name of that second one- (If you don't know it, then be glad I'm sparing you) there existed a very real possibility that a game could challenge the concept of acceptable storytelling and still be somewhat fun. I mean it was rare, I say suddenly remembering the existence of the old classic 'Custer's revenge', the apparently well-meaning 'Active shooter', and the decidedly less well-meaning 'Ethnic Cleansing', but there were a few decent controversial floating around over the years. If you've never heard of a game that was controversial for it's content and not it's quality before, then let me apologise for this being the way you found out. I can imagine you scanning those titles with blood draining from your face as you ask to the heavens "Just who's making these things anyway?" But as I'm trying to establish, it's not all black-hearted garbage tier trash made by people who barely know how to string a line of code together. (Heck, 'Active Shooter' even had multiplayer! Damn, I'm not helping my case...) If there's one game which should be the standard to which all these types of games should aspire to... well at the very least match, it should be Postal.

Or rather Postal II. I've never played Postal 1 in my life and I never really considered it's existence until just the other day when I was researching the series again and noticed it was recently remastered. (It actually looks like a top-down predecessor to 'Hatred', I wonder if that's where those weirdos got their inspiration...) The Postal series is actually a simple premise, it's a game that puts you in the shoes of an irreverent hobo-level version of a Duke Nukem like character called 'The Postal Dude' and places him in a situations to inspire him to go 'Postal'. The controversy would start there, of course, as the term 'going Postal' is derived from some real life instances of US Postal workers having psychotic breaks and proceeding to commit murder, usually several counts of it. But, considering even Terry Pratchett has made a reference to it in one of his projects, I'd hardly call it the worst of the worst in terms of offensive names. It's mostly just an expression now, split from it's ancestral routes.

I always heard of Postal 2 growing up as this game with a sort of legendary reputation, one of those true classics of the age that simply must be played, and therefore one of those games that either turns out to really deserve its idolisation or one who's age has begun to show. I was much too young to be seeking my own games out when the thing first came out, and so I came it to much later with the weight of expectations behind me, and the insistences from various other people that this game was just 'hilarious', and so I approached with quiet the long list of pre-conceived notions already present. And the takeaway? The game is nowhere near as funny as so many out there seem to think, as you could probably have guessed. A lot of it's topics are supremely, intentionally, dated and the quips from the Dude have almost aged as badly as Duke Nukems', except the Dude was always supposed to kind of be that pathetic figure you looked down upon, so it stands the test of time just that tiny bit better than the Duke does.

Yet that isn't to say the game isn't full of funny moments, it's just not in the writing. Speaking much to this game's strength, the absurdity and outrageous nature of the actual gameplay moments in this semi-freeroam living-world simulator are fantastic. I have memories of doing insane things like chasing around drug dealers with nothing but a never ending stream of urine to battle them with, using the actual game mechanic of picking up a cat and sticking it on the end of your gun, barrel up the butt, to act as a silencer, or simply running around a church with a pair of loppers and leaving a covenant full of armless preachers in my wake. (I genuinely have no excuse for how I ended up doing that last one, they just gave me the loppers and that's how things turned out. Don't blame me, blame the violent tools! Unless they only become violent tools because they were placed into my hands... Oh god, the circle logic is drowning me!)

So at this point you might, quiet rightly, be asking something along the lines of "what?", "What the heck?" and "Are you feeling okay, you sort of sound like a psychopath", to which I'd say that you're starting to pick on the dark twisted fun that 'Postal' can be at it's best. Set in the town of Paradise, Arizona; Postal II follows the exploits of goatee-haver 'The Dude' and his dog Champ as they try to make it through a full week of doing chores for his wife. We're talking basic chores, from picking up groceries, to returning library books to- getting Gary Coleman's autograph? (I said these references were dated) The game presents these tasks with the promise; 'you could go through the whole week, and therefore the game, without killing a single person!', which clues you in right-fast that practically none of these tasks are going to go to plan. But even then, you're likely not prepared for how off-the-rails things get.

I'm talking about the sort of events that are The Dude having to go around town and get signatures for a petition, but ending up being insulted and spat-at by most of the people he approaches; so just a simple encounter to test your patience. Or visiting the development studio of Running With Scissors only to be simultaneously assaulted by a wave of protestors who campaign against the violent leanings of the gaming market by enacting violence against the Dude. Or maybe you just want to go to the library, only to be attacked by a mob who set the place on fire and try to murder you. As you go on throughout the game it becomes less and less of a question about whether or not you're violent or a pacifist, as the game presents it, and more of a conundrum along the lines of "Okay I'm actually being attacked here and should probably defend myself." Although you can absolutely over-react to people being mean to you on the street by pissing on them until they vomit and then setting them on fire, it's really up to you. And then there's the notoriously dour ending of Postal 1 which implies that The Dude is deeply schizophrenic, opening up the possibility that maybe every situation is imaginary and The Dude is just a mass murdering psychopath who flips out over imagined sleights. Am I reading too much into this? I might be reading too much.

All that being said, going into a game like this it's important to remember that it came out in 2004, and that means the first-person aiming mechanics are decidedly archaic and, honestly, kind of bad. Although I should say, that's bad by modern standards, if you're used to games from that era then you won't find anything objectional in the pointing and shooting. The healing mechanic is kind of annoying too, which you likely could have deduced from the moment I wrote the words 'healing mechanic.' Yes, this is a living world game with health that doesn't regenerate, because that wouldn't exist as a standardised game mechanic for several years more, and instead you're forced to use healing items like- a crack pipe. (Okay, that's a little funny.) Postal II is certainly dated, in it's presentations, it's mechanics and it's writing, but there's still some special spark of unique charm underlying the whole thing too.

Whilst The Black Eyed Peas might hold up this game as a testament to the worst the world has to offer, (I'm not kidding, this game appears in their video for 'Where is the Love?') I regard it as dumb, but also a fertile springboard for a whole bunch of fun nonsense. Heck, the game garnered such a cult following that it was still receiving fresh content nearly 11 years later and even had the honour of being scapegoated in a real-world mass robbery court case. (I thought only GTA had reached that level of fame.) Of course, it's still a bit of a mess, and I would be no means call this an unmissable classic. Heck, I haven't even finished the game myself (the aforementioned library scene was just so annoying I gave up) so I can't even review the thing. But if you're bored of the mainstream play-it-safe slate of games and want to dip your toe into the other end of the spectrum, the Postal games may just be the titles for you. (Just don't, if you can even find it, play 3. That's a whole other blog's worth of crap.)