If you're familiar with Running with Scissors' Postal game series, none of what's to follow will surprise you. If, on the other hand, you've never heard or seen anything about the previous Postal titles, you might want to hit the Back button and never come back here again… or perhaps opt to turn on the TV and watch a nice, wholesome episode of That's So Raven or something on PBS. Really.
It's not that Postal is a bad game or necessarily bad for you. After all, when a franchise gets a number in its name, it usually proves that it has a big enough audience to warrant the development and release of sequels. And this is a group of games that's mostly been released on PC and Mac, so it's list of potential fans - and naysayers - is somewhat limited. To many, it's just that the Arizona-based developer has gone over the line for many people in the taste department. If the concept of playing a game that includes your character setting another one on fire - and then peeing to put it out - will cause you any anxiety, grief or other health issues, by all means stay away.
Justin from NoobFeed writes - Games like Postal 3 sometimes get delisted and disappear forever, but is this something that actually matters when the game is bad?
It's about preservation. Doesn't matter how bad the game, the movie, the book, the history was. It has to be archived, so that 10 years from now we can be like "oh yeah, this shite exists" and then again in 50 then 100 and then we can be like "this was what they were doing 100 years ago, how interesting"
The Postal games have always been somewhat of a mixed bag in terms of how they are received. The first two were not masterpieces by a long shot, but they have somewhat of a cult following. In case you haven't heard of the series before let’s bring you up to date, that's if you haven't already clicked off after realizing this wasn't a review for Portal 3. The first Postal game was released back in 1997 by American developer Running With Scissors (previously Riedel Software Productions of Spy vs Spy fame). A 3D isometric violent shooter that put you in the shoes of The Postal Dude, a guy pretty down on his luck that wants to slaughter everyone in town with a wide-array of weapons, it was pretty extreme at the time. The sequel released 6 years later, now a first-person affair in an open-world. Again as The Postal Dude, it's more of same except there were objectives added in the form of chores, such as buying milk from the grocery store or picking up your paycheck from work, and you could choose to go about it as a decent, upstanding citizen or you could just cause mass chaos. Anyway, while both games weren’t reviewed by critics too well, they were particularly fun for what they were.
From the review: "The Postal series of games have been primarily known for the controversy caused by their extreme levels of violence, disregard for graphic content, and exploitation of stereotypes. With the change from the Unreal to the Source engine, Running with Scissors had a chance to take the franchise beyond the simple foundations of bad humor and shocking imagery of past games. Unfortunately, Postal III continues in the tradition of its predecessors by containing generic gameplay, off-color humor, and an assortment of bugs that hinder the overall experience."
