izigame.me

On it's release it was a legendary game back at school. Not because everyone praised it, but because it existed more in legends, than in actual reality. I don't think it would be hard to ask your parents to buy a copy, nor were there any age ratings, nor the sellers would ever care what they are selling and to what age. But most of the sellers just didn't carry it, no one was printing the copies, no one was buying it, no one was playing it.
After living in the legends for several years, i finally got my hands on that legendary maniac simulator game (which later the humanity would come to call, "edgelord bullcrap"). It was a stupid fake top down shooter with bad controls, bad graphics, where your clump of pixels "shoots" in the direction of the other clumps of pixels. But hey, at least the tone and the sound design of the first level were kinda on-point. And then you can never win the first level.
When Postal 2 came out it was more of a game, and it was perfect for kids. It's all doo-doo pee-pee unjokes, parodies, referential and topical "humour". When your life and cultural experience is the size of your own lifespan and of the news on TV — Postal 2 is a perfect match and a perfect encapsulation of your personality. I played that and enjoyed, it until i grew up to be a young adult and begrudgingly finished it. But all that time we knew that Postal 2 is just a yankee fartile comedy, it's not even a real homicide game. Postal is the king of that genre, and Postal 2 is just a parody.
Well. I couldn't finish Postal not because i was dumb, or didn't knew english, or was inexperienced, or anything. I couldn't finish the first level, because Postal is not a game, it's a troll prank. I bought it 15.VII.2013 after it came out on Steam. I opened the achievements list, and it says, "Oh, you press F1!
Start the second level." That's not just dumbass trolling of paying customers, it's bad boomer trolling of paying customers. By the time the game has came out, lost a lot of its meaning, often being used for control groups or character selection or commands. You have to be that old to expect that button to consistently mean "help". Well, after playing for a bit in november of 2014 i just got bored of this bad game.
Along comes the Hatred. When people who never play games, absolutely hate games, and want to destroy all the games with their whole soul, started a soystorm around yet another new homicide third-person shooter, right after praising GTA for doing the same thing, usa notsee people started in turn projecting their own insecurities into the game made in europe. That time all the people who wanted to distance themselves from both usa sides, claimed that the game is just average, basically a re-make of Postal. "But worse", they were adding just in case, to not to be seen as too centrist. I was in the same camp, saying the same things, because i haven't played the new game, and haven't played Postal in years. Even RWS themselves, hungry for any miniscule shred of any publicity, started to say that their games have morals, unlike those non-usa-made inferior bad immoral satanic games! Well, in the end i decided to download a "demo" of Hatred and to give it a fair shake. After finishing that imperfect, but awesome game, i just bought it for full price.
And then in the september of 2015 i decided to just finally finish the Postal no matter what. No matter what came out on top. Because Postal is absolutely terrible and it gets only worse. Postal is a third person high-up shooter game. It uses crayon drawings of a child as backgrounds, and then you control an Alone in the Dark-tier 3D model to shoot other Alone in the Dark-tier 3D models. Making 3D models to look like they belong inside the 2D backgrounds is extremely hard and time-consuming. Being both a very small studio and lazy hacks, RWS didn't do a good job. All the hitboxes are absolutely terrible, and the crude child drawings are bad and flat in themselves. You constantly get stuck in fake geometry. The "angle" of the camera is different between the levels. Some of the angles are pretty low, some levels are proper top-down. And all the levels that are not just boxy buildings are a nightmare to navigate.
As a "top down" or "isometric" (both terms are inaccurate) shooter it had to be balanced for the aspect ratio being bigger horizontally than vertically. Then the game has a giant persistent GUI cutting the vertical FoV even more at the top and the bottom. With such big ratio, the enemies attack you only from a distance that can fit half the vertical FoV. Well, thanks RWS for that decency, being killed off-screen sucks arse. The flip side of such design, is that you can see and shoot the enemies from the sides and diagonals, which are significantly longer than the AI's distance of sight. And here's your game, just try to spot the enemies from as far away as you can. And try to spot them hiding behind "foreground" objects.
After some levels the enemies start to carry rocket launchers and all your mid- to end-game guns are also explosives and launchers. So the whole thing turns into you stopping, shooting, then evading the enemy's rocket. It's almost not even a homicide game anymore, just a generic Famicom-era pastiche "top down" shooter. So after chewing this cud for some time, i got morbidly bored with it, i turned it off and never turned it on.
I always thought that i got pissed with the bad levels, especially the caves. For, like, almost ten years i've believed that and was avoiding this game. After seeing someone mentioning Postal again, or something else, that led to me thinking about it, i decided to check if it has Steam cloud enabled. Well, it has, so i played it for a bit, and it turned out my last save was at the beginning of the penultimate level. It seems i was not even pissed at the game anymore i was just extremely bored. I could finish it in less than an hour almost ten years ago, but i just got sick of it. Well, now i can check this checkbox.
The ending is a dumbass pussy crap. The cat ate something bad and runny, and now your roomba cleaned the whole flat and decided to paint it brown. After that many levels of boring shooting the dude comes to a school producing clones, and can not even commit a usa basic education program. Then there's a crappy powerpoint ending, with some narration but i couldn't hear anything it says with all that noise and there're no subtitles. So this "legendary" homicide game is just a very bad game. And as far as homicide genre goes, it loses to GTA, especially the modern ones where all the torture is glorified and extremely graphic. It loses to most optional play styles in CRPGs, like Fallout itself. It's not on par with any weeaboo garbage, which is all graphic, intentional, almost always effective, and usually outright vile. And of course it's not even comparable to Hatred, which is this, but of high quality, extremely fun, very funny, and with great gameplay, that is neither just shooting stationary AI dum-dums, nor playing a Famicom top-down cartoony shooter with rocket launchers.
Postal was so hard to obtain not because it's so forbidden and scandalous, it was so hard to obtain because no one wanted it.