Looking at: Postal 2

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Context is everything

The recently announced top-down shooter has attracted quite a bit of flack, and not without due cause. The trailer of Hatred, which I'll post below, depicts the player character randomly killing people without any reason, particularly minorities and women. 

Not safe for work, or life

Take Hatred for what you will, whether you believe the developer's claim of it being a "brutally honest portrayal of gaming" or just a blown up version of games like Super Columbine RPG or Shool Shooter, crude games designed to shock you. Personally it doesn't look that appealing to me, even as a fan of top-down shooters and lacking a moral center. 

Why am I talking about Hatred? Well, time and time again Hatred has been compared to Postal 2, from 2003. The Postal games, at least the two "good" ones are notorious for the amount of controversy they created, and a lot of it seems pretty similar to the kind of accusations being thrown towards Hatred. I actually like Postal 2, and I'm going to talk about why I think it and Hatred have very little in common. 

American Psycho

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You use cats as silencers for some weapons. This is not a normal game.

Postal 2 takes place over one week in the small Arizona town of Paradise. You play as "the Postal Dude" a trench coat wearing ginger living in a trailer with his horrible wife and terrible dog. Each day tasks you with different objectives to complete, ranging from the mundane to the slightly crazy. You'll do things like return library books, buy milk, cash a paycheck, or get a petition signed. That's not where the crazy come in. 

A lot of games say they let you "play the way you want" but Postal 2 really means it. You can successfully complete the entire game without using any of it's myriad of weapons. Some sections are certainly more difficult, but it can be done, and there's even an achievement for it. When the game makes you wait in line to buy milk, you can actually wait in line, exchange the proper amount of money, and purchase your milk to complete the objective. You can also unzip you pants, piss on the cashier, and cut his head off with hedge trimmers. It's all up to you. 

I won't say Postal 2 encourages the pacifist route. Later objectives will often force enemies against you, and one section in a brewery damn near requires you to kill some rednecks. The difference between Postal 2 and Hatred is that Postal also never encourages violence, at least not wanton violence against innocent bystanders. Going... postal and shooting up a neighborhood will bring the cops down on you, and usually kills you. It's comparable to the GTA series, constantly adding consequences for your psychotic actions. 

You take the good, you take the bad

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Gary Coleman appeared in, and endorsed Postal 2. THIS IS NOT A NORMAL GAME.

Postal 2 isn't a good game, not by any stretch of the imagination. It doesn't have good characters like the GTA series that get you invested, or really any redeeming qualities. But it also doesn't glorify it's violence, and leans really heavily on the idea that it's a parody of gaming. It makes you do menial tasks, but gives you the tools to do them violently. At it's core, Postal 2 represents every office worker or service industry employee's innermost desire to go apeshit on the world around them. 

It's unfortunate that the dev's couldn't just leave it at that, and Postal 2 to often finds ways to shoehorn in violence. At the end of every day you character is added to another faction's shit-list, and to many of the tasks have bizarre circumstances that end in bloodshed (you happen to be in a church when terrorists attack, or in a bank when there's a robbery). It's attempts at humor and social commentary often fail spectacularly and the game contains a lot of dark jokes and gallows humor. 

Perhaps worst of all is Postal's real world connection to a deadly shooting in Montreal. Noted nutbag and jackass Kimveer Gill killed one woman and injured 19 other people because he was upset with society. Postal 2 was specifically blamed in this incident, and it's been cited in a long list of supposed videogame related incidents as well. 

Postal 2 is a parody, but it's one that cuts the line pretty thin. You have to be fairly cynical to actually understand Postal 2, and it's not something a lot of people are able to get. It's a disgusting, filthy, crude, and offensive game, no matter how you look at it, but there's a certain truth lying in it's grime. Like Bioshock or Spec Ops: The Line, Postal 2 is a game about games, mirroring the worlds around it and showing us how disgusting we really look. 

Maybe I'm wrong about everything. Maybe Hatred is just a big joke aimed squarely at an industry that's become devoid of humor. Maybe Postal 2 isn't a high class satire wrapped in a low class shooter. Maybe I'm an idiot screaming at nothing. In the end, we all need to decide for ourselves.