Postal 2 • This Can't Be Good for Me

something very interesting happened to me last week and it's all thanks to one game [Music] postal 2 is the exact opposite of everything I look for in a game it has incredibly thin artistry the controls are clunky the jokes almost always with the game crashes all the time and the story is practically non-existent it doesn't reward cleverness or foresight and above all else it's the absolute last thing I would show somebody if I wanted to convince them of games ability to be artful but wow I love this game as long-term viewers will know when I play a game with moral choice for the first time I always go for a completely angelic run killing as few people as possible and trying to make the world a better place this takes a little bit of restraint in a game like metal gear solid or dishonored but in postal it takes all the restraint in the world to not do completely horrible things hi there would you like to sign my petition would you please sign my petition I've done a no-kill around a postal - but my first run was full of the most idiotic violence I've ever committed in a game and that first run was about a thousand times more fun so what is it about this game that just begs and begs for me to piss in people's mouths cut off their limbs set fire to elephants and cats and tase Gary Coleman until he pisses himself how does this game completely rewire my brain so that a shotgun and an innocent woman go together in my head like a red key and a red door in another game well there's a lot that goes into this so I'll start with the most obvious lines the core gameplay of postal 2 is all about going around town completing chores whether it's to buy some milk or return a book at the library however just about every objective will have a huge line of people waiting in front of it and you have to just sit there in line until they're all gone I could stand around waiting for the people to get through this line at the bank keeping my hands it controls the entire time so that nobody takes my spot in line or I could kill these people shoot these tellers run into the back room shoot these cop kickin this door shoot these cops take all the money out of the vault then run away shooting all the cops on my path each of these methods will take about the same amount of time but man 1 is way more fun than the other and hey while I'm at it I might as well set this dying man on fire and piss on him to put out the flames just as he's inches away from heaven you don't even really think when you're playing postal 2 you just get your hands on the controls and next thing you know you're doing this I'll give an example by this point I'm pretty far into the game that's been three and a half days and I've killed well over a thousand people after looking around at the 30 or so dead bodies on the street I'm on whose only crime was simply being there I decide to myself I'm doing doing 5 minutes without doing something completely horrible well the first thing I do is walk into this store I'll buy some food with all of this money I have I'll probably have to put this in slow mode to get across how fast my thinking was here as soon as I walk into the store I see all these donuts behind the clerk so instantly I jump over the counter and steal all the donuts and when this lady pulls out to go and I take out my shotgun and blow her away the funny thing about this is that doughnuts are nearly worthless as a healing item but as soon as I saw them I had no more free will this was my destiny so I walked outside disappointed in myself for barely making it 10 seconds without doing something horrible all right I won't kill anyone for five minutes starting now I thought to myself I looked at my map I needed to get some food for a barbecue I was having and looked like I had to pass through this circus to get there I walked through the area and I see this man selling food I'm not going to kill him this time I'm not well I buy the food from him and it turns out it's just some burger not the food I need for my objective so I killed him stole all those burgers saw these elephants set them on fire shot up everyone I could and next thing I know I'm pretty much torturing the last couple of survivors and about the worst way you can do so in this game I like to challenge myself to see how much harm I can do to them without living them die what the hell is going on here doing the objective in a more fun way ie robbing the bank is one thing but I gain absolutely nothing and doing all this oh yeah and I lost my five minute pacifism challenge for the second time in a row these characters are incredibly annoying and it's clear the game wants me to see them that way so that I go postal more often but I have no idea what level of irony the game is operating on and for that matter what level I'm operating on am i killing these people because they're protesting violent video games am i killing them because there's such a clumsy and childish satire of people who protest games am i killing them because of the bad voice-acting or is it just because I hate this godforsaken town so much well again I don't know what level of satire the game is operating on clearly everything it does is sarcastic and exaggerated I mean the first 30 minutes of the game has you gunning down protestors at the game's creator running with scissors with the CEO and game designer of said company the lovable Vince does he get a [ __ ] line you want money - [ __ ] you - is this chance all the satire we're supposed to see or is the fact that this is such a childish way of expressing disagreement on the issue also a part of the joke if they were just protesting in a realistic way I probably want to kill them since the bloodlust hasn't taken over this early in the game if it was just a slightly exaggerated satire I just roll my eyes and keep walking after all killing them would only make me as childish at the game but because the satire is so so so stupid it comes full circle and these people are fun to kill again I'm just using my holy gas can to cleanse the world of this terrible satire for another example let's look at al-qaeda I'm not shooting down this clerk because I suspect he's a terrorist and I'm not doing it because he's Islamic and I'm not even doing it because he overcharged me for goat milk I'm pretty sure I'm just doing it because he and the store are such a childish satire of I guess Islamic people did someone slaughter a goat in here no seriously I want to know is the game making fun of Islamic people is it making fun of itself or is it making fun of racists who think that this guy's army of machine gun wielding wives upstairs isn't all that unrealistic however many layers of satire are at play here they're all gonna die well what about the elephants and the cats I mean you saw it in my last video at one point I was just tossing cats out of my inventory into a fire I had started I didn't just do that for the footage that was just something I randomly decided to do with my first playthrough it's not like these random animals are a satire of anything yet it's practically impossible to look at these elephants and not instantly try to set them on fire I think it might just be virtual bloodlust by the time you see these elephants for the first time you've already gone down the slippery slope of doing horrible horrible things in this game and so when you come across these elephants it's pretty much all you know how to do in the game there is literally no reason whatsoever why you would ever benefit from setting these guys on fire the only thing I can think of is if there were cops at the circus attacking you and you wanted to startle the elephants into attacking the cops and yet not setting them on fire doesn't even occur to you until you're just fighting off the last one looking at the charred corpses of the other surrounding you again elephant plus gasoline tank is just as natural a combination in your head as red key plus red door is in any other game it was times like this when I was setting elephants on fire or running down the streets trying to line up fleeing pedestrians so I could dismember twenty legs with one machete throw that I would look back on how I was behaving in the beginning of the game when my future end was murder spree was just a thought in the back my mind I remember wanting to get arrested so I could get a police uniform as I learned from Sevilla Levin's awesome Pro postal series that got me interested in the game I would walk up to a cop and flash them and they'd smack me with their baton until I put it away and arrest me this seemed like crazy behavior at the time but by Thursday the fourth day I was just casually breaking into the police station and killing everyone I saw a terminator style I started off every day by breaking into my neighbor's house stealing his body armor and terrorizing him in some new way then I'd break into the police station kill everyone steal crack from the evidence Locker and grab a police uniform then I'd rob the bank stop by my local crack dealers house and buy a couple pipes before killing him and his friends and go about the rest of my day looking at it this way it's clear to see how postal to slowly turn this pacifistic player into a lunatic one small step at a time by the end of the game I wasn't even using the machete or the sledgehammer to kill every person I saw I had graduated on to the grenade launcher as you guys can probably guess for my general pretentiousness I'm not a big fan of super childish games and I generally think the games like this that fall on the toy side of the spectrum only go against my mission of helping people see games as a serious artistic medium a couple of years ago I tried playing some postal - I hardly killed anyone and as a result all I had to have fun with was a bunch of terrible satire and jokes so I quickly quit the game and forgot about it for a few years however this time around I looked at those terrible jokes and I pissed in their mouth and cut their legs off and I had a whole hell of a lot of fun doing it if I had to sum up postal to in one sentence I would quote the dude himself this can't be good for me but I feel great [Music] I'd normally relegate this to the description but I'm going away for a bit folks death stranding is right around the corner and I'm gonna be dedicating myself a hundred percent to playing through that game and getting a hopefully fantastic video out on it it's gonna be live as soon as possible so keep an eye out for it no waiting till Monday between death stranding in this vertigo situation the last month or two has easily been the hardest time I've had with the channel yet I hate breaking away from my schedule but even as I read these words I'm not sure if I'm about to go into a terrible bout of spinning or feel so close to one that I have to go straight to bed at 11 a.m. and call it a day I pretty much can't watch movies go to concerts get my oil change go on dates or even just take a walk right now but even more than all of that it's killing me to not be making content here my usual pace it's not like I'm in any actual danger even when I have a vertigo attack while driving I've got enough people close to me that I can manage a ride but man it's annoying anyways no pity parties here thanks for sticking with me see you on the other side of death stranding when I feel like [ __ ] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 404,536

Rating: 4.915 out of 5

Keywords: postal, essay, analysis, gameplay, tricks, horrible, awful, disgusting, fire, elephants, cats, innocent, murder, stupid, racist, racism, meta, irony

Id: QS1iTNOnxzY

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 03 2019