I'm a gun toting badass - at least virtually. I've shot many a round through my frontside bus and I aim for the passengers, I do. Little heads ducking and scurrying around as I rattle the bastards full of holes. My window onto the carnage shines back with millions of colours and a quick refresh, and teeth glow green through my grin – just a flicker in my creepy low lit room.

It is at that point I realize that I share a lot in common with the main character of Postal 2. He's a red-headed trench coat-wearing trailer-trash computer game-programming piece of shit. Okay fine, maybe we're not that similar, apart from being sort of creepy. But he does have this attitude - a sense of humour that really resonates with me. It's a humour that is blacker than the inside of a coffin on a night that is moonless due to a total solar eclipse.

Postal 2 is set in a virtual hell-hole. It's a southwestern American town inhabited by the filthiest, sluttiest, most sadistic and offensive swine that stagger across the face of America (yeah, they're despicable). You will hate these people, and you will want to kill them. At first you may just be disgusted by the lifestyle of the main character (P. Dude). After being sent out by your whiney wife to get milk and your severance cheque from the computer game company, you really get the feeling that your character is a loser.

You will be heckled on the way to your objectives, but being a reasonable person like me, you will probably just brush it off. In the process of acquiring the cheque you will become involved in a gun battle that results in crude decapitation. But all of that happens more or less in self defense. The "Parents for Decency" savagely attack the game company, and you and your game-programming friends are forced to turn the shotguns on these pathetic zealots. You feel justified as you swing the shovel on that oblique but critical angle at the protester's neck.

It all fell apart for me when I arrived at the bank, to cash my last cheque. Okay fine…on the way to the bank I peed on a woman and ran away from the police, but that was all in cold blood. No one had pissed *me* off yet. The bank changed everything. In order to cash my cheque I had to wait in a queue. It takes forever. Rude bank patrons have all sorts of petty questions to ask, and there is no end in sight. Frustration mounts. With a sweaty palm I grip the .44 magnum handgun that I stole from my neighbour's house and finger the trigger. I'm mad. These people are filthy scum, and they're wasting my goddamn time. But…I can handle that. Geez, I've had to do this my whole fucking life, and nothing is going to change now that I'm armed.

Oh - is that right? Just as the line clears out in front of me, some badass punk comes up and buds me in line. He tells me to go fuck myself, and that I'm a pussy (did he really say that?). Well I SNAP! I looooose it! I head-fake him with the cheque-book- well, that's not true. I just blew the lice off his dirty fucking head as it spun down the hall. Yeah, that felt good. The teller screams. My cheque bounces out of her twitching hand. I see red and people scatter. The ATF arrive. BIG trouble. I'm forced to kill every last one of them, and then I proceed to pour my neighbour's gasoline all over their corpses. As I leave the forsaken place (after cleaning out the vault), I set her up to burn for a long time. And I don't find out if she does, because I'm too busy running down the street with my dick out, pissing on anyone who is too stupid to clear out.

Yep, it's a messy game. But for anyone with a filthy black sense of humour, it is a masterpiece. In fact, I try very hard to think of any other game like it. Postal 1 comes to mind, Carmageddon, the original Grand Theft Auto, and especially, Quarantine. These games accessed the same essential blackness of Postal 2, but none went as far, as big, or as insane along this offensive axis. In Postal 2 the main character’s voice and his attitude are hilarious. You'll casually butcher a herd of innocent civilians and the character will jibe "Here I am, just enjoying my 2nd amendment rights, and you people had to Freak out on me". Another expression I have to quote is "You probably thought that you weren't going to die today...Surprise!".

The weapons are innovative and uniquely destructive. All the standard skull-crackers are available, plus the napalm-launcher, the gas-can, the combat-shotgun with mounted cat-launcher, the tazer, the rotting bovine head, ninja-scissors, and of course, ol’ Johnson –the short sword, popeye the midget sailor…well maybe that’s not a weapon, but it does cause people to pause, wipe their face, and possibly vomit. In this delay period you can whip out something a little more dangerous.

I've reached my tolerance level with this game. And this isn't because some of my professional friends failed to apprehend its humour (because god, there's no hope for those poor saps). It's because you can only hit people with the tazer and pee on them for so long. I mean the only real thing to do in Postal 2 is to totally offend people. If you are not forcing them to sign a petition that they want no part of, you are throwing a putrid rotting cow head at them, waiting for them to vomit blood, then setting them on fire and taking screenshots as they run around burning and spouting blood.

Yeah I know it’s fun for a bit. Shit, it took me a few hours to prune down my screenshots directory. But in the long run, a cold-blooded virtual killer will become bored. There is no stealth component to the game. You can't really sneak up on someone. And who would want to - they're inevitably going to run, and you will have to taze them (silently) or else blow them away with some high-caliber weapon (or bovine appendage). Or you could just pee on them. The bottom line is this: in Postal 2, sooner or later someone will attack you, or, god-willing, you will attack them and all will descend into flesh-rending carnage. You will become so irate that you will kill every last rotten person in the level.

Technically, it is a fun game. Not the best graphics and detail, not the worst, but perfectly suited to the purpose of the game. The feeling of violence is well-honed. Clipping the top edge of a bystander’s skull with a .44 hollow-point round is a comfortable experience, and the physics modeling keeps up. Heads roll when they’re kicked, bodies flip to the ground with morbid momentum, and cars flare up and blaze into the sky.

And I’m talking about a game that came out 2 years ago? Maybe not that long, but I had to reinstall it in order to properly recall the feeling of launching a severed cow head. Even if it doesn’t add up to much on the graphics front these days, you can ramp it up to 1600x1200 with 2x antialiasing and 4x anistropic and still get decent performance. Pixel blurring, texture shining, blood mist and smoke really hide the game’s age. And as I mentioned before the audio is solid. Apart from P. Dude’s graveyard humour, there are screams, bangs, explosions, as well as cussing, barfing sounds, and the hollow “thwack” of a billy club hitting something soft, yet also hard.

And that's about it, gamer. Oh..and if you are wondering about the moral side of this article, the abyss thing…well fuck. I'd better come clean here. The title was a bald-faced lie - a trap for the sappy readers. I don't think that this game has ANY transfer to reality. Hell, you can trust me with a primed phosphorous grenade any day, and in any state of fierce intoxication. Now I’m not sure whether or not your kid can be trusted this way, but I know that this game WILL NOT increase the chance that his/her thumb will slide off the spoon, and a muscle spasm will drop the grenade down her/his pants. Nope, the dirty little bugger will probably do that with no help at all. Most importantly I had you read this article. You got to the end, and were infected on the way, I hope. Just get this game, or some game, and exercise your sense of humour.