I was just gonna tase him, but his friends like him less than I do.

I feel the same way about this game.

"Given the amount of frustration involved, I highly doubt that you'll want to replay it."

Yes, it actually asks you to do this.

A climactic helicopter battle. Not pictured: excitement.

Here's the crazy thing about Postal III : it knowswhat it is, and it really, really doesn't care. "GTA's physics are better," its sunglasses-clad main character constantly quips, rotating through an annoyingly short list of one-liners as he scores kills. One frustrating, friendly-fire-packed escort mission outright mocked me. "Good luck not hurting them in this AI clusterf***," said the intro text. "Hahahaha!" it adds, driving home that Running With Scissors is not only aware of how bad its game is, but thinks it's funny that we would pay for it and play it. So then, I'm forced to ask: Can a game be so hair-pullingly, gut-wrenchingly, face-palmingly bad it's good?A thousand times no. It looks, sounds, and performs like a bad Source engine mod, and it is without a doubt one of the most broken games I've ever played. It crashes constantly, features enemies so dumb I feel dumber having fought them, and rewards the painstaking effort of completing its obnoxious, repetitive objectives with pain roughly equivalent to a stake in the eye. Self aware or not, this is a bad game.Now obviously, Postal III isn't trying to go head to head with modern gaming's army of smile-and-I-will-crack-your-face serious shooters, a la Call of Duty. It wants you to laugh, and it's not above clumsily crashing through the fourth wall to achieve that goal. "Jokes" abound -- most of them homophobic, racist, sexist, and probably some other -ists I don't know about. Add appearances by every sleazy Z-list "celebrity" from Ron Jeremy to Uwe Boll and a poor attempt at a grindhouse aesthetic to the mix, and you've got a game that's tryingto conjure up low-budget B-movie vibes. Problem is, Postal III's a game. If a game's not enjoyable to, then -- laughs at its own expense and juvenile "humor" or not -- it's already failed.Postal III's shooting is servicable., however, is most certainly not. Melee hit detection feels like a drunken bar brawl with a ghost that can't even be hit by other ghosts. Missions generally devolve into GTA-style rampages through semi-open areas, but without variety, freedom, or fun. Instead, you just take potshots at wave after mind-numbingly tedious wave of brain-dead enemies until a cutscene puts a merciful end to the proceedings. Meanwhile, missions that don't involve killing everything -- for instance, helping Al Gore retrieve stolen Segways -- would be pleasant dashes of spice in a bland stew if they weren't also burdened by Postal III's jerky, imprecise controls and "do this X number of times" mission structure.A little level design mojo, however, could've gone quite a way toward remedying much of that. Yet while Postal III's environments come in all manner of sizes -- from tight-fitting to wide open -- there's very little in the way of things to actually do in any of them. Character interaction is basically non-existent, and there is (as of now) no functional free-roam option. It's a far cry from Postal 2's ambitious, though incredibly flawed, focus on openness. A step back instead of a step forward.So, what's actually new? Why, a good/evil morality system, of course! Because we're totally playing Postal because we want to be trenchcoat-wearing sweethearts! On the upside, the different alignments take you down fairly divergent story paths based on your weapon of choice. For instance, go lethal and you'll be a cackling demigod of decapitation in no time. But if you opt to merely knock your foes unconscious -- say, with a taser or the rather self-explanitory fart gun -- you end up on the slightly less psychotically homicidal side of the law, saving your dog through slightly sketchy police work as opposed to wanton murder. So there's technically a decent amount of replayability to be found. Of course, given the amount of frustration involved, however, I highly doubt that you'llto replay it.Trying to be the good guy, I found Postal III's friendly AI has a nasty habit of diving into your bullet stream as though it's suddenly remembered the idyllic childhood it spent picking daisies with your hyper-exaggerated terrorist foes. The end result, then, is that everyone -- friend and foe alike -- turns against you, making the murder-everything-that-moves path far less frustrating than the goodie-two-shoes approach.The festering, maggot-filled cherry atop Postal III's frustration sundae, however, is its writhing mass of technical issues. I eventually gave up trying to count the number of times the game crashed on me (after I smashed my abacus in a fit of rage). Frequent loading screens that regularly hit the 30-second mark only made each restart all the more painful. And then there were the downright strange glitches, like the one that reversed my controls (backward = forward, etc) and turned my character into a glue-coated homing missile for the nearest corner -- where he'd stay until I indiscriminately fired my guns to jiggle him loose. This was not an uncommon occurrence.It's frankly incredible to think that Running with Scissors made fans wait eight years for. Is the trademark Postal "humor" still there? Postal Dude's frequent remarks about hoping to "kill women and minorities first" say hello. But a lack of freedom, unforgivable glitchiness, and generally terrible design make this a hard sell even for fans of the series. Even so, I'll always remember Postal III for the moment it gave me the chance to sock the smug grin right off the face of everyone's least favorite film director, Uwe Boll. It's every self-respecting gamer's fantasy, but at that point I really, really just wanted the game to be over.How could murder and mayhem go so wrong? I blame cost-cutting at the US Postal Service.