Postal 2
(Redirected from Paradise Lost)
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| ♥ | This article is dedicated to Gary Coleman, who died of an Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) after being removed from life support at the age of 42. (February 8, 1968 – May 28, 2010) |
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Postal 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Running with Scissors and released on April 14, 2003. It is the sequel to the 1997 game Postal. and was released for Microsoft Windows in April 2003, macOS in April 2004, and Linux in April 2005. Postal 2 and its predecessor have received notoriety for their high levels of violence, stereotyping, and black comedy. Unlike the first installment, Postal 2 is played from a first-person perspective, rather than an isometric perspective. The game is the first in the series to feature an open world.
Plot
In Postal 2, the player takes on the role of a man known as "The Postal Dude" as he goes on in his everyday life doing mundane tasks (Such as picking up a paycheck, getting milk, returning a book to the library, etc.) However, when doing these tasks, everything seems to go wrong. For example, when the Dude cashes in his paycheck, the bank gets robbed and he must fight way way through it.
On Friday, after the Dude completes the last errand, the Military releases a mind-altering gas onto the town of Paradise, kickstarting the Apocalypse. As he makes his way home, cats rain from the sky and everyone is out to kill him. When the Postal Dude finally gets home, however, the Bitch reminds him of her Rocky Road that he forgot since Monday. The Dude shoots himself to stop listening to her nagging.
Apocalypse Weekend
On Saturday morning, the Postal Dude wakes up in the hospital, his head bandaged from a near-fatal gunshot wound. The original game's ending leaves it ambiguous as to whether or not the Dude shot his wife or if his wife shot him in the head after he wakes up in the hospital he finds a card from his wife saying that she is leaving him. It was later revealed on the official website that the Dude shot himself due to his wife nagging him. The Dude's ultimate goal is to recover his trailer and dog Champ, and to this end, from the hospital.
Except for the zombies that appear later in the game, it would show the madness depicted at the end of Friday in the previous petered out. The Dude proceeds through several missions including assignments from his former employers, Running with Scissors, encounters with mad cow tourette zombies, confrontations with terrorists, and the military. Periodically, the Dude's head wound causes him to enter a nether realm where he is attacked by clones of the late Gary Coleman. Throughout the weekend, the Dude fights off hordes of zombies, the Taliban, and the National Guard until he finally faces a zombified Mike Jaret, an employee of Running with Scissors. Once the Dude destroys it, he leaves Paradise in his car with his dog and his trailer, Paradise explodes due to a massive nuclear warhead he "borrowed" to destroy a rival video game development and publishing company. The Dude's last words of the game are "I regret nothing".
Paradise Lost
After the events of Apocalypse Weekend, the Postal Dude and Champ are escaping from the nuclear fallout when Champ sees a stray cat on the road. Champ jumps out of the car window, giving chase back toward Paradise. Not wanting to leave his sidekick behind, the Postal Dude turns his car around attempting to save his misguided companion. Unfortunately, his head wound starts acting up, causing him to crash his car, the blunt force knocking him unconscious as the mushroom cloud looms over him.
Trapped in his mind, the Postal Dude witnesses visions of a "dark future". He awakens eleven years later from a radiation-induced coma on the outskirts of an "unfamiliar town", thus beginning the week-long search for his missing sidekick.
Gameplay
The game has five levels that are split into days of the week; Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
At the beginning of each day, the Dude is given several tasks or "errands" to accomplish, such as to "get milk", "confess sins", etc. The player can accomplish these tasks in any way desired, be it as civilly or as chaotically as possible, and can be accomplished in any order. The game also includes two extra tasks that are only activated after completing a certain errand (on Wednesday) and later if the Dude takes a piss (on Friday). After completing all the errands of that day, the Dude heads home as soon as he enters the next area (except for Friday due to the Apocalypse).
In between tasks, the player is allowed to explore the town of Paradise, causing chaos or just moseying around. Completing errands is essential, however, as some districts and areas of the town are barricaded up, thus unavailable to the player until a later day.
Why It Regerts Nothing
Overall
- It was the first fully 3D Postal game with a open world, which was impressive for a little barely known company.
- Rick Hunter reprises his role as The Postal Dude and has multiple hilarious things to say in a badass voice. Additionally, in Postal 4: No Regerts, he is also available as a voice option for the Dude.
- Offensive, yet hilarious jokes and scenes, such as a church getting attacked by Al-Qaeda, being able to kill the late Gary Coleman, gay and racial stereotypes, along with tackling touchy subjects, like terrorism, police brutality, animal abuse, and even attacking and referencing the late American politician Joe Lieberman.
- The town of Paradise, Arizona is open-world, with lots of places to explore.
- The game is just as equally violent and bloody, if not even more, with tons of blood and gore and awesome ways to kill people using the weapons.
- Creative and fun to use weapons, like Jerry cans, napalm launchers, scythes, sledgehammers, machetes, diseased cow heads, and even your urine which can be useful for putting yourself out if you're burning.
- The late Gary Coleman (who portrayed Arnold Jackson in Diff'rent Strokes, and Kenny Falmouth in The Curse of Monkey Island) makes an appearance where one of the objectives is to get his autograph.
- The "A Week in Paradise" mod (AWP) added tons of weapons and lots of them made it to the Steam version of Postal 2.
- A very well-designed fire system, where it can spread easily, and overall cause lots of chaos.
- The game allows the player to complete their tasks in any way. You can cause utter mayhem through the game or go about things as if you were a normal person. For example, one of the tasks is to get milk from the convenience store and you can either violently get in front or wait patiently with no trouble at all.
- If you find the normal weapons boring, you can always "decorate them."
- The Apocalypse Weekend and Paradise Lost expansions feature more weapons, more subjects to make fun of, and overall more fun.
- The 2015 re-release introduces Steam Workshop (with tons of add-ons such as the infamous Postal III Dude model, Project Marica (adds drivable cars), and a remake of the cut Pigeon Hunter Mission from Apocalypse Weekend!), has a new DLC called Paradise Lost, and the 20th-anniversary update also includes an unofficial patch called xPatch to the game, adds and restores various stuff such as Rick Hunter's unused voice lines, the middle finger option from Paradise Lost makes a return and you can now give flip the bird to NPCs, David Eddings (The original voice of Claptrap from the Borderlands series) as the voice of Pisstrap in Paradise Lost. and also, the Ludicrous difficulty was introduced (but enemy behavior is drastically changed).
Paradise Lost
- Multiple fan-favorite characters from the vanilla game return in Paradise Lost, along with their voice actors reprising their roles as such.
- Corey Cruise, who voiced the infamous Postal III Dude, reprised his role from the travesty of the game in Paradise Lost, but as the real Dude's alternate self. Regarding Corey Cruise, he also voiced the psychiatrist at the end of POSTAL Redux, a voice option in Postal 4: No Regerts, and the Dude again in Brain Damaged, making him the "favorite kid" in Running With Scissors due to his fitting voice for the Dude.
- Loads of new missions, weapons, enemies, and locations.
- Just like the vanilla game, it is open-world.
- The game is just as equally violent and bloody, with tons of blood and gore and awesome ways to kill people using the new weapons.
- The fire system returns and spreads as fast as the vanilla game.
- Heavily improved hitbox scans for the Dude and the NPCs, meaning you can get the "RAFIBOMB!!" achievement more easily as the male NPCs will able to react properly to being kicked in the balls.
- The DLC also openly mocks modern gaming practices like microtransactions, day-one patches, and pop cultures like the Fallout franchise and Game of Thrones.
- Just like in the vanilla game, you can unzip your pants and openly piss on anything and anyone.
- Cat silencers make a return to the game.
- You can complete an entire mission using nothing but your piss. (You'll even get an achievement for it!)
- John Murray from the Eternal Damnation fan mod makes a cameo in the game as a mini-boss in the asylum part of the AC parts mission.
- The Hell Hole (or simply Hell) is just as terrifying as the headache sequences in Apocalypse Weekend, complete with screaming and hellish landscapes.
- There are seven snowmen hidden around the Nuclear Winter zone. Pissing on all seven of them nets you a parody of the "You know nothing, Jon Snow" meme as an achievement.
Bad Qualities
Overall
- You can actually, if you choose, urinate, especially on dead bodies. This caused a great deal of controversy to the point of the game being banned by the Classification Office (Te Mana Whakaatu) in New Zealand (if so, distribution or purchase for personal use is a criminal offense, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $50,000.), in October 2005 by the Australian Classification Board, though it was re-rated with an R18+ rating after a request from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) in October 2013. However, it was only in Australia that the entire game was removed from Steam as of April 18th, 2024, and for Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons to remove the game on Germany's version of Steam, likely due to its content and most of the games allegedly appearing on the "The List of Media Harmful to Young People", also known as "The Index".
- It can crash easily. For example: Shredding a crowd with a chainsaw repeatedly. This too was also fixed in the Steam re-release.
- The Steam re-release lacks content from A Week in Paradise such as all of the new weapons from Eternal Damnation and M@DJ@cK@L, playable arcade games, and the School Daze level. The only thing to do is to install AWP Forever or AWP: Re-Delivered (if you're playing it with the unofficial patch called xPatch) to be released to restore all of them.
- The AI is pretty stupid in general.
- If you hang around for a while without using a weapon, chances are that you'll see a random pedestrian pull out their gun and try to shoot at whoever is nearby, which usually results in them being gunned down by police.
- If you stand still while agitated cops are standing nearby, they may ask you to drop your weapon if they've seen you use it. However, they seem to have no issues with you picking it up immediately afterward.
- Agitate someone who's using a melee weapon. Unzip your pants and stand still while they run up to you. Piss on their face just as they're reaching you, and watch them back away with disgust, only to once again run towards you after a few seconds. Piss at them again, and watch them back away again, only to yet again start running towards you soon after. Repeat ad infinitum.
- The game has several bugs like when the water glitches out if you pee in it and three game-breaking bugs.
- The base game is known for crashing, especially in its earlier pre-patch years. The game in its current Steam form still suffers from crashes, though they are mostly far and between and only tend to happen after long playtimes when loading saves after the first time.
- In Paradise Lost, on Friday after you defeat The Bitch and return to Paradise from Hell, you are tasked to either leave Paradise or revisit and kill every faction leader in Paradise. If you go to Gary Coleman and try to kill him like the other faction leaders, sometimes you can kill him without triggering the check on the map, therefore tricking the game into thinking you hadn't killed Gary and preventing you from getting the "Best" ending.
- Also in Paradise Lost, at least the initial release, the marijuana plants at the herb farm on Friday lacked collision detection, making it impossible to complete the mission as they could not be harvested. This was patched quickly, but those who pirated the game didn't have access to the Steam patches so they suffered the glitch the worst, barring a small few who found workarounds (and even those workarounds don't work for everyone who tried them).
- Due to Steam's new policies, some of the explicit achievement names had to be bowdlerised when publicly featured on both the game and DLC's store pages:
- The achievement artwork for "C U Next Tuesday", which spells "CUNT", has a disembodied hand covering the NT with an N sign.
- "Fuck Duck Dynasty" becomes "Duck Dynasty".
- "Cesar Milan is gay" becomes "Cesar Milan is very happy".
- The achievement artwork for "Scientology Level: OT VIII", which features two men having gay sex, is replaced with a meme picture of Tom Cruise (a known actor) happily flexing his wealth while chomping on a cigar.
- The achievement artwork for "It's not cheating, because it's YOUR dog", which features a dog giving his master a blowjob, is replaced with Champ happily looking at a jar of peanut butter.
- The achievement artwork for "One time, at band camp..." which features two penis-shaped recorder flutes, is replaced with a woman playing a regular recorder flute.
- "Gary vs. A Giant Penis" becomes "Gary vs. The K. Man" and its achievement artwork, which features a man riding a penis with a knife, is replaced with Gary fighting against Krotchy.
- The achievement artwork for "Rain on your Wedding Day", which features a groom pissing on his bride, has the groom cropped out.
- "Ape Rape" becomes "Ape Gape".
- "Dick Massage" becomes "Dick Message".
- "Bitches Love Cake" becomes "Ladies Love Cake".
- "Reddit's Famous Double Dongs" becomes "Getting DP'd" and its achievement artwork, which features the infamous picture of u/doubledickdude's two penises, is replaced with a soccer mum holding two M16s by their barrels.
Paradise Lost
- Like the vanilla game, it still suffers from several bugs and can crash occasionally.
- The late Gary Coleman makes a re-appearance in the game, but his voice samples from the vanilla game are recycled because of his passing before the DLC's release.
- None of them such as Victoria Bell and Marcus Davis, The original voice actors for The Bitch, Uncle Dave, and Krotchy reprising their roles in Paradise Lost. At least Greg Blackman, the replacement actor for Krotchy was the closest to the former.
- The boss fight against Two-Ears, the leader of the Bandits in their Hideout, is very easy as his minions are extremely easy to set aflame with just a spray of aerosol flamethrower and he can be put down by a few well-placed Sawed-Off Shotgun rounds.
- The miniboss fight against John Murray is easier than Two-Ears' boss fight as he can be put down with a revolver execution.
- The pizza slices now only heal one HP instead of the normal five HP from the vanilla game due to them being found almost exclusively in toilets.
Reception
Postal 2 received "mixed or average" reviews from critics, as it had a score of 50/100 on Metacritic, contrasting the "generally favorable" reviews by Metacritic users. Some of the game's better reviews came from PC Gamer and Game Informer. On the other end of the spectrum, GMR and Computer Gaming World (CGW) both gave Postal 2 scores of zero, with CGW deriding Postal 2 as "the worst product ever foisted upon consumers." In response, negative quotes from Computer Gaming World's review ended up being proudly displayed by Running With Scissors on the box art of the Postal Fudge Pack. CNN journalist Marc Saltzman wrote that the game was "more offensive than fun" and concluded that "it simply goes too far, too often, and offers little else."
On Steam, it has "overwhelmingly positive" reviews, with 96% of Steam users giving it a positive review.
Videos
Trailer
Reviews
Postal 2
Paradise Lost
External Links
Postal 2 on Steam
Postal 2 on Metacritic
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