Games released for both the Apple II and the Commodore 64 in the mid and late 1980s often shared code, making them very similar in looks, sound and game play, at least as much the hardware allowed. Sometimes (Marble Madness) this style of development made both versions suffer, because neither system's strengths were taken full advantage of. Other times (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), the developers were smart enough to tweak the code to run better on each system. And then there are games like Paperboy, where the code was mostly written for one system, and pretty much left to fend for itself on the other.
Paperboy on the Commodore 64 is a fun little port, making good use of the computer's capabilities to create smooth scrolling graphics and music as catchy as the arcade game's. No such capabilities exist on the Apple II, and yet the game tries to use them anyway. The result is a nearly unplayable mess. The animation is painfully choppy, and the game music sounds like a bunch of marbles getting dumped on a xylophone, in no discernable pattern.
Because of the common code, the game play that survives is, in some respects, identical to the Commodore 64's. This is not a bad thing, and actually, if you can get used to purple sidewalks and headache-inducing animation, you just might find a few minutes of entertainment here... at least until you discover the joystick button response is as flaky as the rest of the game, and collision detection isn't always so hot either.
Dedicated Apple II gamers were used to such challenges, and so this version of Paperboy probably had at least a small audience. But really, some games just aren't meant for some platforms, and this is a prime example right here.