Maxvorstadt: Hm, is this the right time to install Postal II again?
DadJoke007: I did and I was reminded of how poor the gameplay was. In my opinion, the problem isn't the edgy humor or the violence, but that the game was pretty bad to begin with. Without the edgy humor, the game is as forgettable as every other mediocre FPS from the '90s and early '00s.
It reminds me of all those meme games over at Steam, it's almost like the prototype meme game.
The game is really for a certain kind of player. It's better to think of Postal II as being a sandbox game before anybody really knew what a sandbox game was. There's something rather satisfying about gunning down an entire marching bad when I'm having a bad day.
As far as being forgettable, isn't that like virtually all games of the era? How many of them do people really remember that aren't by iD or 3d Realms? You'll probably run out of titles rather quickly as the bulk of the remainder are Unreal.
Darvond: Those both have points. I'm not certain Postal has a point aside from, WOW LOOK AT HOW SHOCKING THIS IS, like Hatred, Agony, and other such games.
fronzelneekburm: Postal 2 is one of the most innovative, subversive and original games that the stagnant FPS genre has put forth. It manages to be transgressive in ways that heaps of indie shovelware attempted and failed at - all the while being amazingly fun as well. Some of that genius might have been accidental - indeed, neither the Apocalypse Weekend expansion nor Paradise Lost were able to successfully recapture that same magic. I'm highly doubtful they'll hit the ball out of the park with Postal 4. But on it's own merits Postal 2 is a perfect thing - both as a scathing satire of post-9/11 America and as a clever inversion of FPS clichés.
The supposed "shock value" of Postal 2 has been greatly exaggerated. Compared to something like Soldier of Fortune or even Doom 3, the violence in Postal 2 (at least in the vanilla version) is actually quite tame and entirely played for laughs. Playing fetch with your dog using severed heads... How could anyone take this seriously?
Hatred, on the other hand, is rather mediocre and Agony (from the 40 or so minutes I played) seems outright bad. I really don't see any similarities between these games other than "muh controversy".
Indeed, compared with the original Postal, Postal II just isn't that shocking, it's more or less a parody game to the point where I'm not really sure how anybody could be particularly shocked.
The movie, OTOH, was plenty shocking and arguably the only decent thing that Uwe Boll has ever contributed to film history.