Postal 2 was released right in the middle of what should have been my prime teenage-edgelord years, but while it's had a resurgence in popularity due to nostalgia, returning to it, the game strikes me now exactly as it did then - a forgettable and borderline broken, amateurish piece of software that was crowded out of all but the most fringe playerbases by other, better, more interesting games.

Postal 2 is Hatred, if Hatred mistakenly thought it was funny - it was a try-hard attempt at outrunning South Park in a race no-one was watching. The irony is that in hindsight South Park turned out to be tedious fence-sitting 'all sides are equally stupid' takes from a pair of moron Gen Xers who thought that not having a strong opinion was cool and were also responsible for mass-marketing anti-semitism to an entire generation. It was seen as edgy and provocative in the 2000s, and now it's laughed at for its rigid, pointed adherence to committing nothing of value to any issue. And in trying to out-do Parker and Stone the developers of Postal 2 shackled themselves to the exact same sinking ship.

The game is...not great. It's ugly, and poorly put-together. There are constant issues with controls and soundtrack - you can hear the audio clicking repeatedly in the opening minutes of the game because whoever did the sound design stitched together a bunch of stock sound effects and didn't crossfade the adjoining tracks. The same 3 second soundbite of a bird repeats endlessly. And while there is something to be said for the effort put into programming all the systems that go towards simulating the mundanity of everyday life (and towards your disruption of that mundanity with a can of gasoline and a box of matches), this was an indie game with a certain amount of ambition developed before crowdfunding could turn these games into something worth playing. It's tedious, but not in the way the developers intended - it's tedious mechanically, like playing in a small, ugly, sadistic sandbox. The most interesting thing you about it is that you very quickly discover that doing everyday tasks like shopping for milk, and burning everyone in the town alive, are actions that get boring at exactly the same rate as one another.

That said, I think there's a certain amount of accidental Tom Green-esque avant-garde nihilism in the absurdity of this game. It's kind of funny to watch the 'Parents For Decency' whip out pistols and try to murder every member of the Running With Scissors development team because they don't like their violent games. That's funny satire because it actually says something real about these people, and, because these 'think of the children' groups are usual wealthy conservatives, the mocking commentary kicks up at a group that will otherwise avoid any punishment for their hypocrisy. The icing on the cake is that you can then choose to kill them in self-defence, proving that you're exactly the thing they were protesting. Postal 2 has something to say occasionally. Very occasionally. But then give it a few hours and you're murdering dozens of shrieking racist stereotypes of Afghanis that all look like Osama Bin Laden.

If you kill 30 people from every type of skin colour you get an achievement called 'Sheriff Arpaio would be proud'. I had to google his name because I thought he he was a mass murderer with some kind of pointedly indiscriminate political agenda. Nope - he was a white Sheriff in Arizona who specifically profile non-white people in one of the most widespread examples of open racism in American law enforcement since segregation was made ‘illegal’. And given recent history, that's saying something. He alone cost the taxpayers of his one county $140 million dollars via lawsuits brought against him. The f*cking *U.S. Justice Department* sued him. If I hadn't researched that I wouldn't have realised he was actually a massive racist a**hole who specifically targeted Hispanics and black people, because Running With Scissors made a false equivalence in their throwaway gag that just happens to mislead the player about the racist crimes of the person they're referencing. Sheriff Arpaio would be proud...because it was a numbers game? Yes, that's what he liked. Persecuting *everyone* - as many people as possible, and not one *very specific* demographic of people.

I'm not saying that this one stupid joke intentionally whitewashes the racism of its namesake, and I'm not saying that this, coupled with the developers' portrayal of Middle Eastern people as homogenous terrorists screaming gibberish through the singular face of a mass murderer is in any way an explicit demonstration of their worldview. I'm not saying that, in the same that I'm not saying that a crack-smoking, dog-kicking, wife-abusing, spree-killer living in a trailer in any way reflects their perspective towards the poor, and that this entire game is one big middle-finger to everything the developers personally dislike. I'm just saying that there's a marked difference between forcing the player to kill brown people because they're all terrorists and forcing the player to kill white people because they're vegetarians. Or because they have red hair. At the very least, the panel of people who mindmapped the ideas that came together to form the foundational commentary of the game were dumb as dogsh*t, and the end result of that is 'whoopsie we're slaughtering dozens of Muslims ho ho ho the Indian food store has Afghani suicide bombers in it all these people are the same skin colour Sheriff Arpaio did a bad thing to *lots of different people very very equally!*'


And its interesting that a game touted as a free-for-all and remembered for it's 'all sides are bad' South Park-esque 'sick of the system' worldview, actually depicts its town exactly from the perspective of one very specific demographic of people - the single most represented demographic in the American society: middle-class straight white male Gen Xers who feel disenfranchised but are also ardently pro-America, hate the poor despite not being wealthy themselves, hate the rich for being richer than them, hate 'rednecks' for being too uncivilised, hate 'conservatives' for being too stuck-up, and hate liberals for not fitting into a stuck-up conservative worldview. When you think of yourself as a lone, correct singularity trapped in the centre of a world filled with people who are wrong because they care too much about things you don't like to think about, literally every other person on the planet becomes a potential threat. Your life is given meaning by the feeling of persecution this constant target on your back brings. And it's a lot easier to take your anger out on a toothless social group than to comprehend your own lack of identity. Particularly if your specific demographic - not theirs - is the one nearly all media is catered towards. Movies are telling you you're the hero, but your job tells you that you're just a rube. Who's to blame? Don't bother thinking about it, because you might end up on a crusade, and you don't want to be like those histrionic losers who keep going on about their problems. Make a game in which you kill all those people instead. That'll teach em.

Postal 2 is the equivalent of a stand-up comic that gets heckled for telling an offensive joke, and then threatens to shoot-up the audience if they won't stop booing him. It was made - poorly even for the time - by a bunch of dudes playing to the easiest possible crowd: edgelords. It's a power fantasy for people who don't have anything meaningful to fight for, so they fight gingers. Y'know, just like South Park. Everyone is bad, stick to the middle. The middle of a spectrum. The middle of the road. The middle of the river as it sweeps you out to sea. It's all the same.