Lethal Enforcers (Arcade) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
377A playthrough of Konami's 1992 arcade light gun shooter, Lethal Enforcers.
Played through on the machine's default settings.
Lethal Enforcers is a game I fell in love with the first time I played it. I found the SNES game (in its giant box that included the blue Justifier light gun) under the tree on Christmas morning of 1992, and I largely ignored the rest of the games I got until I managed it to beat it. It kicked my rear end over and over, but with enough obsessive practice, I finally managed to get through it, and I loved every second of it.
The funny thing is that I knew very little of it at the time, and I though it looked neat from the little blurb in Nintendo Power, it wasn't a game that I ever said anything about, much less asked for. Apparently my parents knew my tastes better than I realized, though, and somehow even than I knew myself :) How glad I was for that totally unexpected surprise.
It wasn't until a few years later that I got to play the arcade version (that this video is of), but it was just as awesome as I had hoped it would be after spending so much time with the killer SNES port.
First appearing in arcades in 1992 (with ports appearing on the SNES, Genesis, Sega CD, and PlayStation), the game made a huge splash thanks to its use of digitized images in place of more traditional hand-made sprites. While other games had used this technique before this one did, Lethal Enforcers's release date placed it squarely in the middle of the media frenzy decrying realistic depictions of violence in games, right alongside Night Trap and Mortal Kombat.
You play as a Chicago cop who is sent to deal with a series of five "situations" that develop around the city. With little in the way of backup, you act as an army of one against crimes that escalate to a ridiculous scale with nothing but your service revolver, barring the occasional upgrades that you'll find lying around such as uzis, shotguns, and a grenade launcher.
The game plays a lot like Freedom Force or Operation Wolf - it's a shooting gallery with all sorts of colorful backdrops and characters dropped in as windows dressing - and man, does it deliver the entertainment. You take out small sporty cars holding impossible numbers of hitmen, a crazed renegade military office firing rockets from a jumbo jet, and even an Apache helicopter from a factory catwalk before you can call it a day.
All of the backdrops are digitized photos shot on location in and around Chicago, and the people are all actors dressed up in costumes, and here's a big hint: if you aren't sure who is innocent, just shoot at the people in sunglasses. Apparently the criminals never figure out that they'd be safe if they took them off.
The graphics are a little crude by modern standards, but they were amazing in 1992, especially on the big screen of the deluxe cabinet. The jerky animations did their job well enough, and the resolution of the game's image scans is high enough that there is a lot of detail without much graininess, and the short FMV clips kicking off each mission were always a really cool touch. It was more "realistic" than any other game like it at the time, and people loved it for that reason.
The sound is also fantastic. Digitized screams, grunts, and absurd phrases abound as you wreak havoc on the city, from "Eat lead, copper!" as a guy pops out from behind a dumpster, to "Uh-oh!" when you shoot a vagrant sleeping on a bench in a subway station. It's all highly quotable, and when layered over a cacophony of bass-filled gunshots and one of the most memorable Konami arcade soundtracks ever produced, the game's audio made for a huge part of its appeal.
Lethal Enforcers is one of Konami's best remembered arcade classics, and nearly thirty years later, it's still easy to see the appeal. I mean, in what other game can you gun down 300 people and destroy a helicopter over a heavily populated neighborhood, only to then report over the radio, "Situation under control, unit five out"?
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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