i don't tend to do negative pages, it's not my style, i don't play games i know i won't like and i don't cover a game if i don't enjoy it, only exception is if someone pays me, i'm a materialistic woman and i'm not shy about that, this can come back to bite me though and it did with postal, a game i'd heard of with its infamy but it was a game people always made jokes about, it was a meme game people didn't take seriously and because of that i never looked too far into it, this was a big mistake. my roomate owned a copy and so in a conversation with my patrons i agreed to play it since well we did own it and it was requested and this is an exersize in why you should always research edgier games before you actually play them because i have almost never hated a game as much as i hated playing postal and i think how little people take it seriously and how people do treat it ans its sequels as funny meme games is an indictment of so many issues with the games scene as it exists right now.

the game plays like a twin-stick and a basic one at that, high difficulty with health pickups and multiple weapons, though some are basically just variations on the same one like the two fire weapons, grenades that are so hard to use that they'll more often kill you than enemies and you run through levels killing rando's and cops and stuff until you clear enough to move on, it's almost Arcady and it's really gross, you have a population number at the top of the screen distinct from the hostiles the game wants you to clear and you get bonuses for finding these people by checking buildings, it's disgusting and the game doesn't even play well, which, I think is honestly or the best as if this game was *fun* that'd maybe make it even worse, don't gamify this stuff like games so often do, postal started it and games like GTA ran with it to popularise this as being an okay thing to put in games. its disgusting when GTA does it and it's almost as bad here, though maybe less bad overall since you are more likely to feel disgusted at the violence here with its "worryingly close to real shooter rhetoric" notes between levels and creepy music vs GTA's above everything shitty teenage humour in the violence and the writing that it makes you want to think this stuff is somehow "funny", but being less gross than GTA is a bar so low that nothing deserves credit for clearing it, both games are like the gaming embodiments of toxic masculinity.

postal isn't edgy and provocative because it had something to say, its edgy and provocative because it's made by people who were upset other people didn't find the idea of a mass shooting sim fun, at first I really wanted to believe this game had a point because the game is so viscerally uncomfortable to play and experience with its music and vibes and gameplay, the vile things you do had some point to them, some message about game violence or about how we see these events, but it doesn't have anything to say about these things, the game came out before columbine happened so there wasn't much of anything to say and there was no commentary here , just an attempt to make people upset and make a quick buck and once I hit the point of the racist Japanese level it clicked that it had no interest in saying anything of meaning beyond "game violence isn't real" and that it thought that people like me who wanted it to were just fools, honestly maybe I was a fool for thinking a game like this could have any value at all, it's about what you would expect from a group of people who would eventually go on to support gamergate.

as a teen I didn't play these kinds of games because violence was something I was very offput by, I didn't grow up with action movies or violent media, I liked shows like yugioh and Tokyo mew mew and the 4kids one piece, I was a Disney princess barbie kid so seeing excessively violent media was something that was enough to fully scare me off a game, it wasn't until I dabbed in horror games like resident evil and silent hill that I even considered opening myself up to more violent games and it's always been something that's still bothered me a little, I play a lot of action games but I play ones that aren't like.... this. I play DMC and uppers and ultra rumble, games that have combat as a core but are so sensitised of violence that it stops even occurring to you that they *are* violent. even the more violent games I do play, your tomb raiders or your no more heroes or your dead risings are always still very divorced from the human side of that, you're killing zombies or whatever, you're doing it for a good reason like survival or that they have a point, something to say about violence, that even if I might disagree with it I still respect and can stomach even if I don't enjoy the actions themselves, in almost all of these cases I don't even enjoy the violence itself, I like the mechanics or the vibes there, the story and the people ,everything but hurting others, but when I see a game like this, that revels in its harm and its cruelty and its mean-ness because that's all it has, it reminds me that I do still have these firm barriers and I do not want to cross them, it's made me rethink how I see violent media again and I think that I might have been right in my teenage years, violence in games is bad, at least when it's not doing it for artistic merits. games like postal or GTA cross them in ways I think are a little disgusting, sure you can label me a hypocrite if you want for engaging with other violent games like NMH or dead rising and maybe now that I've re-established those boundaries for myself maybe I won't enjoy those as much in the future, but those games having things other than that violence as their value makes me think I will, they'll have something sincere and meaningful, rather than postals hollow, hateful cynicism.

I do respect it in a sense though, for one for helping me remember *why* I dislike violence and why I consider myself a pacifist and also that I respect it for making me feel something this visceral, I hate it, but I respect it and I think it does have a right to exist because it can make people come to these conclusions, even if that's not its point, some media out there I think don't have that right, games like fear and hunger or rapeplay I think are irredeemable and even GTA I have a lot of personal issues with to the point where I would not feel bad if it ceased to exist (ex boyfriends have tried and failed to convince me that "no trust me its cool and stuff"), I don't think postal is quite there, it's sequels seem like a different story though, I feel like once you put milo yianopissant in your game, even if you can merk him, you've crossed that line into "cannot be redeemed" terratory. all this isn't to say that I judge people who do like these things, i'm not morally superior to anyone, I just have different boundries to many of the people reading, you can enjoy and find meaning in games like postal, GTA and F&H all you want, I won't stop you and I won't judge you but that also doesn't mean that I need to respect it, you know, everyone has different boundries and if you try and police those boundries and peoples views on the art outside of those boundries then you're probably *are* a massive asshole, you *should* feel bad and this *is* an attack on you, directly. in the past I have been judged for having a more hardline stance on certain topics that more provocative art does often feature, shamed even for refusing to respect or engage with these pieces and I always felt a little bit bad for it, that sense of *having* to engage with things you aren't comfortable with or you're "anti-art" or lesser or whatever, but fuck that, boundries are okay and they are important and I will not feel bad for having them, this game made me naucious, it made me throw up and it made me cry and i don't need some asshole telling me i'm wrong for feeling that way about it, how i feel about art is up to me and me alone.

the one genuinely good thing I will say about it is that it has some nice backgrounds and some very varied locations (like gas stations, snowy suburbs, carnivals and bases) in a setting that is pretty neat, i like the vibe of that depressing countryside america, they're hand painted and in the isometric levels they look really good, even the expansion pack levels look great like the Japan levels (minus the racist, cruel jokes), a city that has been hit by an earthquake that shakes the level with aftershocks and the shopping mall, there game has a good sense of style to it, even the loading screens look good because they have a very unique dark and gross art style, it's a shame that's the games only redeeming quality. the game has music but I barely noticed it was there, outside of the creepy tracks on the games loading screens, there's also some pretty okay voice acting but it's just too bad it's used to deliver some really awful lines, which is most of them and the story is minimal, thankfully, since what is there is just gross and maybe a little ablist, there are apparently scattered notes in the original PC version but i'm not sure if these were in redux, at least i couldn't find any.

if, for some godforsaken reason you do want to play this, and you shouldn't, nor should you pay money for this because the people behind it are gross, it's on the PC for the original version with its, far more disgusting ending (do not look it up) and a different OST, it has 2 expansions separate, one with 4 new levels like the mall and another bundled with the Japanese release which has levels in Tokyo and Osaka, the redux ver adds these levels in as a free bonus in their own campaign or mixed into the end of the campaign, whatever you prefer, it also adds a cut carnival level, a revolver weapon (that is very useful to be fair) and an, ugghhh, rampage mode, that works as a score attack survival mode, just incase you ever thought this game could maybe be trying to make an artistic point and not just being edgy. this version does have a switch port though and you can even get it physically since it had a limited run release and hasn't held its value at all, this is admittedly a little funny to even exist even if the content (and i use this word wholly derogatorily) of the game stops me from actually wanting to keep the copy we own. the studio would go on to make like, fucking 5 more of these damn things, the immersive sim sequel postal 2 and its expansions where they devolved into full blown edgelord humour proto-4chan south park bullshit (derogatory in every way possible), postal 3 was pushed out by another dev in conjunction with them and is a weirdo third person edgelord game, but its one they've disowned so honestly maybe its secretly *the good one*, there was the uwe boll movie, which I've seen and yeah it's like, his one bad movie honestly, i'm usually a defender of the guys work since alone in the dark and HOTD are some of the best B-movies out there but postal was just kind of garbo, he does cameo in it though, so thats cool. there was the 4th game titled "no regerts" which is a little funny and it was taking more after 2 it seems, even had a console release that, not knowing how much i would hate this series, i got bribed $20 to get a copy of it, it's been shipped and i will cover it but i don't want to, but i like money so :/ and there was a boomer shooter spinoff called brain damage, postal and boomer shooter are two phrases both so anti-everything i like that i haven't even looked at gameplay for this one, i just do not care, there was some mobile games and a browser thingy too. i'm not playing most of these, don't ask.