Lethal Enforcers 3

When I do posts for this blog I try to write about stuff I've played fairly recently or news I've heard about within the last week or so, but all this having a job stuff is getting in the way and if I stick to doing that I'm going to run out of shit to say in the next few days, so today I'm going to write about a game I beat about a month ago.

So I was in this sports centre type place called Spoccha in Japan.  I think it might be worth doing a blog post on Spoccha itself because it's actually a really cool place to go, but the best thing about it is that they have a free-play game centre right slap-bang in the middle of everything.   Usually the games found in this free-play area are old games or shit nobody ever wanted to play.  Unfortunately, Lethal Enforcers 3 falls under the shit nobody wanted to play category.

I'll give you a little background on this series before I go on.

Lethal Enforcers 1 and 2 were old school arcade light gun games that later got ported to things such as the Megadrive (Genesis) or the Super Nintendo.  Now when I say old school, I really do mean old school.  The game had this weird digitised graphic look so all the enemies looked like actual people but aside from that, it was standard light gun game stuff, shoot the baddies and don't hit hostages or fellow officers.  If you play it now the game is kinda ass, but back in the day it was pretty good I guess. 

I would just like to point out at this point, that due to being from a pretty poor family, I never really got into light gun games properly until House of the Dead came out on the Sega Saturn, so I don't have all that much experience playing these really old shooters when they were new, couldn't afford the gun peripheral.

Anyway, back to Lethal Enforcers 3.  I'm going to admit right now that upon playing this game in the free-play game centre, I didn't even realise it was a Lethal Enforcers game until I got home and looked it up.  In Japan it's called 正義のヒーロー (that's Heroes of Justice for the non Japanese speakers) and it doesn't really play like any other game in the series.

Also unlike every other game in the series, Lethal Enforcers 3 is FUCKING BORING!  I played this shit through to completion in the two player mode but holy crap is it a dull game.  There are about 6 stages, all of which are EXACTLY the same.  You and your partner start off and your character begins running and moving your gun away from the screen will make you stop and defend yourself with a riot shield.  If you are playing the two player mode, the game is kind of like a race so whoever makes it to the checkpoint first wins.  When you reach the end of a few check points, you fight an extremely easy boss and then move on to the next bad guy.  Rinse and repeat until the end of the game.

This game has so many problems it doesn't even deserve to be a shitty downloadable game, let alone an arcade game.  First of all, it's not a nice game to look at and not because the graphics are ugly exactly, but everything is just so bland and boring it puts the player to sleep.  Second of all is the difficulty, this game is way to fucking easy.  Enemies don't use cover or anything like that and they'll just stand in open space taking potshots at you (and usually missing) until you cap them in the face a few times.  Also the bosses are a complete joke,  blocking their attacks is so easy that it's actually more of a challenge to actually try and get hit by them, and this leads me into my next problem.  The racing mechanic is fucking stupid and it's a waste of time.  You can beat the level without killing all that many enemies really, as long as you don't stop running forwards, you'll get there pretty quickly.  On top of that, the enemies are so fucking stupid they barely ever hit you so you may as well just be shooting at wooden targets for points.  The whole check point thing really sucks some of the fun out of the game really.

The exception to the difficulty is the final level where the enemies aren't hard because they are more accurate or anything like that, it's just that the level is fucking dark and you can't see shit.  You'll be running along and then BAM! a wall of bullets come at you, but they won't hit you, you just put your shield up and then spray wildly into the blackness and move along.  It's just a pain in the ass to have to do that every few seconds, so it's not really hard, just really fucking tedious.

To cut a long story short, go emulate Lethal Enforcers 1 or something or go dig out your Megadrive and play it with the gun, just don't go hunting down this piece of shit.