I don't think it's possible to make a "true" sequel to Postal 2 nowadays.

I'm not talking about the offensive humor or the minutiae of its small-scale sandbox and the chaos it lets you indulge in. What makes Postal 2 an exceedingly tricky game to follow up on is the era in which it was produced. Postal was created in the era of outrage. The finest example of this would be Grand Theft Auto and the numerous outrages it spawned at the time. But GTA never let you put a cat's ass on the barrel of your shotgun or go around peeing on people until they vomited. For all of its attempts at humor, Postal 2 was made in poor taste purely to get attention, and it worked wonders. Its content has slightly more historical merit in this medium than, 'hey, wasn't that the game that got banned in several countries?'—at least, if you're in America. It's thanks to Postal 2 that the M rating comes with two separate labels for violence outside of the Cartoon and Fantasy parameters, 'Violence' and 'Intense Violence.'

The problem now is that things don't "work" that way anymore. If there's any game in the past fifteen years that changed how Americans look at the way their games are rated, it's arguably Manhunt 2, and that's only because of how many politicians petitioned for it to get an Adults Only rating. Outside of that, which is small-beans compared to the irreversible change to the American rating system caused by Postal 2, there hasn't been much on offer. In the past ten years, you'd be hard-pressed to find another game like that. The closest analog is Hatred, which caught fire for treating Mass Shootings with more leeway than Uwe Boll. In a sense, Hatred almost surpasses Postal 4 in terms of relevance, if only because it mirrors the hellscape many Americans have constantly lived in fear of for over two decades at this point. Making a game about a mass shooting on that scale and not marketing it to outright weirdos who get off to the sight of Japanese school uniforms is like a cheat code for making your game controversial. Twenty years ago, it was easy to assume that any game that let you kill droves of nameless, faceless NPCs was a straight ticket to hell, much, in the same way, D&D was for the greater part of the 80s' Satanic Panic kicked off by the detestable con-woman Beatrice Sparks. All you have to do now is go through a Post Malone phase and put on this façade of having to say something "important", even if the only words you're saying constitute little more than shock value printed on the half-price pulp that the National Economic Registry hastily rejects in secret, and people will try their damnedest to take you seriously. Jack Thompson is dead.

This is the precise predicament that Postal 4 finds itself in: after its developer sold its soul to the Russian equivalent of Electronic Arts, an act only decried by ardent fans and the developers' post-mortem, the goalpost had moved. When your live-action adaptation only makes headlines because very few people find it funny, and the quotes you're cherry-picking from for marketing revert back to calling it a weaker version of South Park... what's the point? By the time Postal 4 was released in early access, it had been several years since a room full of critics applauded the Kevin Smith movie where Dante Hicks and Randal Graves argue about whether or not going ass-to-mouth is justified for minutes on end. Good Boys, a 2019 movie about children, had a trailer so perverse and explicit that I could see my dad physically recoiling in his seat whenever a trailer for it showed up in the theater we were at. To say that the shtick that worked in 2003 is something that would only spark protest from The Vegan Teacher in 2022 is being exceptionally polite.

On top of all of this... Postal 4's just not very fun. Okay, I'll admit that Postal 2 isn't exactly a high watermark for the medium as a whole. But to say that that's all it is is a reduction. It's dumb fun dry-aged in gold leaf. Once you crack through its shell, the center you're left is with is something that doesn't have much appeal outside of being a digital stress ball with piss-and-shit jokes and a cameo from Gary Coleman, but cutting right to the center is missing the point. It's fun to look around and find new weapons, find your way across the labyrinthine map to buy a Christmas tree in the middle of July, and play around with the surprisingly reactive world in front of you. Sure, it doesn't have the taste of something like Grand Theft Auto, and shivering behind all of the things that I like about it is just about the trashiest game I've ever played, but it's got replay value. What value does riding a mobility scooter across a map that's too large to entertain for more than a second have? "Grand Theft Auto had cars, and now so do we" is the exact mindset that Running With Scissors mocked in Postal 2, and it's something that's shamelessly regurgitated here without any of the wit or subversiveness seen previously; it's in here because Postal 2 had it, and if it's something they can reuse, self-awareness is off the fucking table. The combat's fun, but the AI somehow lags behind a game twenty years its senior. If you really, really want more Postal 2 to the point where you barely have any standards, look no further, but this is the exact kind of reduction that I warned against with nothing to dress it up.

It's not much of an Emperor's New Clothing for Running With Scissors to be met with derision, it's what they based their brand on. Hell, they're marketing this game right now with the 1/10 that GameSpot gave it. Here's where I suggest something completely different: Postal 4 is not only a weaker game than its predecessor; it's also a lazier one. Right down to flaunting the critical reception like a badge of honor! The more things change, the more they stay the same, but in this case, boy howdy have things not changed at all.

Want to make a proper sequel to Postal 2? Forget the apocalypse, forget a contemporary setting, forget mobility scooters and jokes about Karens and that one Tiger King guy and also COVID. None of that is relevant, and you might as well be making a game in another series if you believe it is. Postal built its brand of regression, and the funny thing is, it worked. Not one-hundred-percent, but I guarantee you that the first two games in this series are far more timeless than this will ever be. As I said, it was the era of outrage. 3D had only been a thing for one-and-a-half generations prior, and with video games only being readily available to the consumer for two to three decades, it's easy to argue that aspects of the medium were still in their infancy. Postal wasn't infamous for how good its gameplay was or how particularly shocking it was, it was part of a wave of digital entertainment that set a precedent. Decades apart, speaking about how regressive the series was is speaking about history.

If they wanted to make a true Postal 4, they had to embrace that. Set it back in the early 2000s, or, hell, late 90s. Make it a commentary on the crazed American politics that fueled both games with the stunning insight that such a large gap in time has caused, while also paying mind to the new wave of gaming it was a part of. You don't need a massive map or aspects that feel appropriated from other, much better contemporary titles. Fuck struggling to catch up, this should have been behind.

I know it comes off as pompous and arrogant to readily assume that you could do better than someone else when creativity is involved. Especially in game development, dick-swinging is what typically leads to developers slaving away for years and, in some cases, over a decade on something that might not work out in the end. But consider how fascinating it would have been if Postal 4 actually embraced its roots instead of chasing the bitter aftertaste that III left in everyone's mouth. I'm sure the developers would know; their CEO was unironically tweeting before the 2020 election about how Joe Biden should be thrown in Guantanamo Bay for crimes that haven't been proven.

At least I bought these games before discovering the developer's Twitter...

The most important games for me are ones that seem to pop in to my world at the exact time that I needed them, and Pikmin is a strong example of one of those cases. The moment I was living under my own roof, during the summer before I started college, I felt like a completely different person. I never knew what life was like without the every minor decision or daily bit of minutia being judged with a harsh eye, and subsequent fear, and my first apartment changed all of that. Living alone started as a party, I spent money and time in ways I previously never could, but as the high of freedom wore off, something took it's place, legitimate independence. Local transportation would allow me to effectively perform walkabout's in every area that interested me growing up, and despite growing up in a single parent household, as an only child, this solitude was something different, a vast world that began to teach me thing's. And it was about a year in to this unique solitude that I found Pikmin.
This silly gamecube launch title has valuable lessons about finding peace with death, discovering the logic behind a seemingly harsh world, and most importantly to me, how to deal with being left alone with your own thoughts. I remember sitting in my car in a massive parking structure, before a big event I was involved with, trying to squeeze in a few extra minutes with Captain Olimar and the Pikmin, knowing how important his journey's would feel parallel to mine.
At the end of the day, this is a neat tech demo about a tiny guy fighting monsters, but for someone attempting to finding their own voice; critically, profesionally, and personally, there could be no better companion than Olimar, and no better game than Pikmin.

> Wacky junkyard guitar guy lies on job application
> disrupts production line
> assaults employees
> kidnaps head of security
> murders higher ups
> disrupts concert
> causes family drama
> causes billions of dollars in property damage
> refuses to elaborate further
> leaves

If you play the PC version, download the Anniversary Edition. It fixes some bugs and also serves as a mod manager: https://wiki.oni2.net/Anniversary_Edition
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Maybe best to approach this with a certain greybox appreciation. I don’t think there’s any level here that totally works, no vertical slice akin to "The Silent Cartographer," but there are a lot of cool ideas. Stuff like being able to slide over items to pick them up, thereby skipping a lengthy animation, or being able to go into an overcharge mode where your attack and defense are increased, are the kinds of nuances that an action game thrives on- encouraging you to play well, and, more importantly, to play stylishly.

It’s rare when it all comes together though, and aside from the obvious signs of a rough development, such as the barren levels and disjointed story, (inadvertently being the best tribute to anime and manga of the time, like we’re playing through the only translated portion of some massive series), I don’t know if the combat ever finds a real identity for itself. A lot of the encounters can feel sporadic, fighting an enemy every few minutes or so, in kind of awkward bouts that get very grab-heavy, often spending more time waiting for them to get up than actually fighting them. Feels like the sweet spot is two or three enemies, enough that you’re forced to manage the group with a few well-timed hits, but not so many that you can’t get any moves out. The potential for melee combat is also complicated by its interplay with ranged weapons- which is to say, guns render the melee combat nonexistent.

Well, it’s not entirely true, there are some great looking disarming animations, and because of the arsenal seeming to have been balanced around the axed multiplayer mode, you’re mainly avoiding weird projectile weapons that practically demand you to weave between shots to knock out the shooter. But when you get a gun, especially the power-weapons that litter the endgame, enemies have little in the way of a response, so the last few levels devolve into backpedaling around, firing away as Syndicate goons blithely run toward you.

(Wondering if it’s a problem of the style as much as anything else, the spartan environments and pragmatism of combat clashing with a game that’s trying to evoke Ghost in the Shell and The Matrix. Now I'm thinking reception to the gameplay might’ve been warmer if the game adopted a different aesthetic.)

After beating the game, I replayed some of the older levels to make sure my problems weren’t just a failure to understand it- and there was an appreciable sense of having improved. Had a surplus of health, armor, and weapons to mess around with, and was more consistently pulling off some of the moves that had given me trouble earlier, but it never gelled. There was always a bit of tension on its most basic level, gunplay invalidating much of the promise of the melee combat, and melee combat itself often failing to find value in your massive move list, boiling down to rolling around and trying to find a window of oppurtunity to pull off one of your high-damage grabs.

So I’m not hugely surprised that the game never got a sequel, but I am surprised some of its best ideas never caught on. The few occasions where everything clicked- where I’d slide into a guy, grab his gun, and then floor his buddy with a well-placed sidekick- they felt like Bungie tapping into some of the core appeals of the character-action genre years before anyone else. There’s something great yet to be made with the foundations of the gameplay here, just don’t know quite what it is.