- by Owen Morton
I think the best way to begin here is to pretend that it hasn’t actually been nearly a year since my last article, and to instead make out that it’s only been a week. That way I don’t have to do any explaining.
Right, so. Postman Pat. Some may remember an old article about Postman Pat about three and a half years ago, in which I postulated that someone in Greendale was responsible for the assassination of JFK. And while this theory has yet to be acknowledged as the true story of events back then (or indeed acknowledged at all), this is sadly not the topic of my discourse today. Instead, I wish to talk about a creation of quite impressive stupidity.
I recently (recently, that is, if we’re still pretending it was only a week ago that I wrote the last article) acquired a DVD packed to the brim with about 3000 Amiga games, all of which now work on my laptop. (Well, when I say work, that’s quite a broad definition of work, in that some of them do nothing except produce a black screen and some of the more innovative produce a flashing green screen.) Some of them are decent enough games, some of them are boring, some of them are stupid, and it is of course the latter category that caught my attention the most.
The Tom & Jerry game, for example, gives you control of Jerry and you scurry around a room looking for a mousehole, while Tom jumps around like a demented dervish. When you reach the mousehole, which is bloody difficult, the game informs you that you can now progress to Level 2, and then does nothing. The Lord of the Rings game is commendable in that it takes account of the scale of Middle-Earth and gives you a vast environment to walk around in as you control Frodo, but this is also its crucial weakness – it doesn’t tell you where you’re supposed to be going, it’s so big that you haven’t got a hope of accidentally stumbling upon your destination, and moreover Frodo moves slower than a snail with a broken leg (or something else quite slow, something that actually makes sense, perhaps).
All these achievements, however, pale into insignificance when placed beside Postman Pat – The Video Game. There are four different games you can play – the Main Game, Ludo, Snakes and Ladders, and something else. I have only played the Main Game, not feeling I could face a round of Ludo against such implacable foes as Mrs Goggins and the terrifying Reverend Timms.
Right, so, Postman Pat’s main game has to be played with a joystick. There are two difficulty settings – easy and hard, and I will tell you something right now: they are not telling lies when they say ‘hard’. Feeling (justifiably, I believe) that I am sufficiently mentally advanced to tackle a Postman Pat computer game on a hard setting, I selected ‘hard’ and was instantly faced with a bird’s eye view of Postman Pat’s van, in a little layby in the green fields of Greendale. There was only one road out of this screen, so I moved the joystick carefully and headed for this road, only to crash with great force into a wall. This immediately led to me being informed that I had crashed and that I needed a new van. I was provided with such and I repeated the exact same thing again. After the third time, it was all over – the Royal Mail had run out of vans, apparently. I had failed to progress beyond even the first screen of a Postman Pat game, and I knew I was doomed to everlasting shame if I ever told anyone (which I am foolishly doing now).
Well, for most people, I suspect the response would be, “Stupid game, I’m never going to play it again.” I chose instead to try the game on ‘easy’, and found it considerably more rewarding, the difference between easy and hard being that on easy you can crash the van as many times as you like and never have to pay the consequences. (There may have been other differences as well, but seeing as it was impossible to not crash the van and thus progress beyond that difference, I didn’t find any.)
So, on easy mode, I was informed by way of a message floating across the top of my screen, that I had 25 minutes to go to the Post Office and deliver as many parcels as possible. Easy enough, thought I, as I crashed Postman Pat’s van into a wall, and careered unsteadily off the screen and down the road. Every time I went off screen, the picture changed, and I saw Postman Pat driving down country roads. There were choices of ways to go, there were occasional houses, and there was the same cyclist on every screen, who seemed not to mind being run over – but I couldn’t find the Post Office. It took me literally 15 of my 25 minutes to locate the Post Office, hidden away in a stupid corner outside the village. (I found everywhere else first – Mrs Hubbard’s house, Doctor Gilbertson’s surgery, Peter Fogg’s farm, and Ted Glenn’s lurking place, where he does whatever he does, although there was no sign of Reverend Timms.)
Mrs Goggins greeted me cheerfully and ordered me to deliver a parcel to Ted Glenn. I knew where Ted Glenn was (unless, of course, houses moved around in this game, which frankly wouldn’t have surprised me, but as it turned out, the game was not that stupid) and set off merrily. When I got there, I gave Ted Glenn his parcel, he said thank you, and I went back to the Post Office on the assumption that that was what I was supposed to do. When I got there, Mrs Goggins offered me a cup of tea (most welcome!) and then gave me three letters and asked me to deliver them, though she was less than forthcoming about where to take them. I consequently spent the remainder of my time driving fruitlessly round Greendale, looking for somewhere obvious to put the letters. When my 25 minutes were up, it was revealed to me that I had scored a grandiose zero points, my delivery to Ted Glenn evidently having counted for nothing.
Well, to sane people (sane people, that is, who are sufficiently unstable to be playing this thing in the first place), that really would have been the cut off point, at which they would have decreed it a completely pointless and ill-designed activity. Not me. With Kate, I gave the thing another go, and discovered that sometimes the game does different things – when she delivered the parcel to Ted Glenn, he informed her with some glee that Peter Fogg’s sheep had escaped.
This appeared to be a clue of some sort, so she drove off to see Peter Fogg. He was very pleased to see her, and he said, “Pat, my sheep have escaped. Can you help me round them up?” Pat gave no response, but we assumed that this was intended to be an affirmative, and so we drove off looking for the sheep. We found them in a stupid layby – or rather, we found about ten bright white dots in the layby, zooming around quicker than any sheep have a right to go. Postman Pat got out of his van and this juncture, and refused to get back in, and so we instead had to make him run round the layby chasing the sheep, which eventually all disappeared, though not, I suspect, due to our attempts to round them up.
This earned us 1000 points, and we drove around for a bit, noticing that our points were decreasing gradually. We eventually worked out the cause – every time we ran over the cyclist, we got 50 points deducted. But (and here’s the thing) there is no way to avoid the sodding cyclist, so the process of getting points is rendered completely pointless (geddit?).
And the last thing I want to say about Postman Pat is that for what I presumed to be a children’s game, it was ridiculously hard to control. I wasn’t lying when I said it was impossible to avoid crashing into the walls or the cyclist – the roads are so narrow and the joystick so sensitive that the slightest touch sends you hurtling headlong into a wall at maximum speed. And moreover, for some reason, it seems designed to make you drive in reverse. Try to turn a corner, and the controls will instinctively put you in reverse. Try to do a turn in the road to correct this, and you will still end up in reverse. Eventually you give in and drive backwards through Greendale and the surrounding countryside. Maybe the game’s writer thought that forcing Postman Pat into reverse was the height of hilarity. Maybe he’s still laughing at the thought now, 17 years after the game was made. I hope so, because no one else thought it was remotely funny at all.