WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL - Lethal Enforcers

Publisher: Konami Developer: Konami Release: 1992

Light gun shooters make me sad. They seem to be a truly dead genre, and thanks to our new-fangled, non-CRT television sets, it's pretty difficult to enjoy them the way God intended – with a colourful plastic instrument of death pointed at your screen.

Lethal Enforcers was one of the most popular light gun shooters in the arcade. Rather than using traditional, hand-drawn sprites for the visuals, the entire thing features digitized locations and targets, giving the game a sense of authenticity you didn't normally get back then.

The game is your basic shooting gallery. The camera moves (or doesn't move) along a pre-determined path and it's your job to shoot all the bad guys who pop up in every conceivable location before they shoot you. Mind your ammo, reload when you're running low, and make sure not to accidentally shoot the various civilians, police officers and hostages that simply live to run through your line of fire.

The game was ported to the SNES, Genesis and Sega CD. Differences between the Genesis and Sega CD versions are minimal, mostly restricted to better music and a few more frames of animation (mostly after being shot) for the enemy characters.

Each game also came with a blue “Justifier” light gun. For some reason during the 16-bit and 32-bit generation of game consoles, everyone was making their own proprietary gun peripherals for their shooters. As far as I remember the only compatible light gun for Lethal Enforcers was the Justifier, not Sega's own Menacer. What's more strange is that, if you wanted to play two-player games, you had to order the second, pink Justifier directly from Konami. And it didn't plug into the console, but rather plugged into the bottom of the first Justifier. It's one of rarer 16-bit game peripherals out there today.

I wouldn't say Lethal Enforcers is the greatest light gun shooter ever made by any stretch of the imagination, but it's still a tonne of fun.

What most people don't remember is that Lethal Enforcers was front and centre during the violence in videogames controversy 1993. Sure, everyone knows that Night Trap and Mortal Kombat were really the focus of those hearings, but considering that Lethal Enforcers included extreme violence against digitized versions of real people (much like the other two games) it was also brought up during the congressional hearings that ultimately resulted in the formation of the ESRB rating system.

Of course, good Sega fans know that Sega had previously created their own rating system and had been using it for at least a year before those hearings ever took place. In fact, Lethal Enforcers carries a prominent MA-17 rating on the box.

Something else you might not know, though, is that Lethal Enforcers marks the first time a SNES game featured a mature warning on the box. Right at the bottom in small print it reads “Not appropriate for minors. Recommended for Mature Audiences.”

Even with that warning on the box, Nintendo still censored the SNES version of Lethal Enforcers. Enemies simply disappear when shot rather than playing any sort of death animation. Civilians and police can be hit but don't die. And when the player is shot, the screen flashes green with a white bullethole rather than the red-tinged bullethole that appeared in arcades and on Sega systems.

So, like with Mortal Kombat, the SNES version of the game was graphically superior but not as authentic as the Genesis/Sega CD games.

Genesis Does...