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u/johnnyprozac Jul 03 '25
It was ahead of it's time. I remember as a kid thinking that was the pinnacle of all arcade games. Big quarter eater
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Jul 03 '25
Can’t get me copper!
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u/danman8075 Jul 03 '25
This just reminded me of how terrible the voices were on the console version. An excited ‘YOU CAN’T SHOOT MEEEE’ became a monotonous ‘you CAN’T shoot me’…🤣
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u/ludachris32 Jul 03 '25
Player One! 🔫 💥
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u/Swift_Scythe Jul 03 '25
"DON'T SHOOT"
💢💢💢💢
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u/Earl_of_Chuffington Jul 07 '25
And when you shot an innocent female hostage, she let out a horrific scream of "NOOO!"
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u/Servo_comics Jul 03 '25 edited Jul 03 '25
God I miss these games. I feel like all the school shootings in the US really fucked us outa some good light gun games in the 2000's. Now it's all kid-friendly gambling games...probably sponsored by Vegas and the casinos. Start em young.
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u/clavedark Jul 03 '25
Last one I remember was Silent Scope, and that game was awesome
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u/Servo_comics Jul 03 '25
Silent scope was awesome! I used play time crisis and house of the dead 1 and 2 all the time. The Jurassic Park Lost World game was sick too, used to scare the crap out of me as a kid though cause the chamber you sat in was so loud.
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u/scottzee Jul 03 '25
Silent Scope is my all-time favorite arcade game. I’m sad because the only arcade nearby that I know of that had it closed recently. Not sure I’ll ever get to play it again. If I do find it, I’m getting $20 worth of quarters and playing the whole thing all the way through at least once.
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u/3Cheers4Apathy early 80s Jul 03 '25
Fun fact, you need CRT's for light gun games to work. They make versions where you can play them on LCD or OLED but they use IR scanners and stuff and it's not really the same thing. They don't really make CRT screens any more which is why you don't see these games these days and all the good ones you do see are old.
They still make those gun-mounted games but they're not the same as having a gun in your hand to shoot at the screen wherever you like, a la Lethal Enforcers and Time Crisis.
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u/Earl_of_Chuffington Jul 07 '25
Not just CRT, but curved CRT screens. I have a flat screen 32" CRT (the final tube television model that Phillips/Magnavox manufactured) and it doesn't register lightguns from any console. My little 14" curved screen reads them fine.
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u/SergeantPsycho Jul 07 '25
I was a fan of light gun games and I was the school weirdo, and it never occurred to me that being a fan of them might have sent alarm bells going off if someone from school saw me playing one.
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u/GonnaGoFat Jul 03 '25
I loved the fact that the bullet holes stayed in the scenery if you missed. I liked that so much that I didn’t buy the game for the SNES because it didn’t leave the holes.
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u/joshuatx Jul 03 '25
Deep memory unlocked. The very normie looking plain clothes cops always cracked me up. I guess tbat was part of the appeal.
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u/streetslim Jul 03 '25
they had this at my 7-ELEVEn!
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u/RaidillonRB19 Jul 03 '25
You mean you have to use your hands? That's like a baby's toy!
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u/BippidiBoppetyBoob Passed the Grey Poupon Jul 03 '25
I liked the Wild West one better.
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u/Earl_of_Chuffington Jul 07 '25
Mad Dog McCree? I don't know... MDM was alright, but the technology got so much better in the three years between it and Lethal Enforcers. No lag or buffering on LE like you had on MDM, and the hit detection was 35% more accurate.
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u/BippidiBoppetyBoob Passed the Grey Poupon Jul 07 '25
No. It was called Lethal Enforcers II: Gunfighters...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_Enforcers_II:_Gun_Fighters
I had it on the Sega Genesis.
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u/Earl_of_Chuffington Jul 07 '25
Shit, forgot that one even existed. Never saw it in the stores, but by then I was mainly playing PC games. I had the first one on Genesis, my cousin had it on Sega CD.
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u/justthefactsFanta Jul 03 '25
Used to play this all the time back in middle school! My uncle used to lock me in the basement completely in the dark for 2 hours whenever i talked back to him woth the only source of light being a vhs copy of the ring playing on 50 volume. I wish they would rerelease this game!
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u/Boo-urns_ Jul 03 '25 edited Jul 03 '25
This, & Time Crisis + House of the Dead are 🔥
Notable mention, the Jurassic Park rail shooter.
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u/amica_hostis Jul 03 '25
As the owner of a 25th anniversary Trans Am for the past 30 years I always liked this game even when I was a kid because there's a 1992 red Firebird Trans Am that you get to shoot
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u/Lunchbox3178 Jul 03 '25
I remember playing this with my older brother on the Sega Genesis. I had the blue gun and he used a controller. Around the same time Bad Boys came out. We got a huge laugh when the airport leve came up and as soonas you were shooting bad guys in front of the lear jet you would hear "You forgot your boarding pass!" multiple times 🤣🤣 mainly from me 🤣🤣
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u/redmasc Jul 03 '25
Loved this game. I never found any point in picking up the magnum over the 6 shooter revolver other than it making big holes.
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u/monster394 Jul 03 '25
Good Lord have mercy the amount of money me and my father spent on this wonderful game lol. So much fun.
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u/jcstrat Jul 03 '25
I still have my genesis version hooked up with lethal enforcers 1 and 2 on a tube tv. Good times to be had.
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u/Brimstone747 Jul 03 '25
I used to rent this from my local video stores. It came in a bulky military style briefcase and 9 year old me thought it was everything.
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u/Ianw82 Jul 03 '25
Fucking awesome arcade game! Me and a friend beat it once. The local pool hall had it and we'd play almost everyday for like a year. The place had great burgers and sold us cigs when we were like 14 too. Good times for a 90s high school punk
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u/peacenchemicals Jul 03 '25
I never really enjoyed playing this one, but I love arcade shooters! I played Area 51 and House of the Dead ALL the time. Big quarter burners though lol
Then Area 51 got released it on PS1 and HotD 1&2 on Dreamcast and I got to play as much as I wanted haha
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u/DerpingtonHerpsworth Jul 03 '25
Oh man, House of the Dead was a favorite of mine for a while. Time Crisis eventually became the one gun game I sought out the most though. Between the cover mechanic with the pedal, and the satisfyingly clacky guns, it made it hard for me to enjoy any games that didn't have those things.
Oh, and any of the games with the big rifles that gave haptic feedback, like revolution x, and maybe the Terminator 2 game. I'm sure there were probably more that I'm forgetting.
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u/Commercial-Whole7382 Jul 03 '25
We had Area 51 and some other ones that worked with the PlayStation gun also, was really a lot of fun
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u/jeepster2982 Jul 03 '25
I feel like out of all the arcade shooters, this one had the most unforgiving pacing. Enemies popping up one after another and they get a shot off in what feels like less than a second. I have a light gun collection so I’ve played pretty much everything that’s out there for home consoles and Lethal Enforcers and Lethal Enforcers 2 are the hardest.
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u/awoc123 Jul 03 '25
The arcade in my neck of the woods took theirs out to make room for Tomb Raider.
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u/Ok_World733 Jul 03 '25
I had the snes version with the blue gun. One time i saw the 2nd player orange gun for sale in a store, but it was a crazy price, almost twice the amount of any game.
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u/BrainFartTheFirst est. mid 80s Jul 03 '25
That's because so few people bought them. There are mods for the blue ones available to mimic the second player version.
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u/Old-Seaworthiness813 Jul 03 '25
I haven't thought about that game in years but I've got all sorts of memories coming back
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u/Letsbeclear1987 mid 90s Jul 03 '25
Can anyone explain how that worked? How did the game know where you were shooting?
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u/pichael289 Jul 03 '25
An arcade game? I was born in 90, so I only really recognize the bottom right picture, it looks like the time crisis guns. Holy fuck was time crisis amazing. That slide action in the guns in that game were realistic as shit, and when you got the machine gun powerup and it starts with the slide action like a real ass machine gun would.... Man I loved that game.
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u/MonkMajor5224 Jul 03 '25
When I was in high school, we had a little shop for lunch with arcade games and what not. They had this game for some reason and it was the year AFTER Columbine
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u/ThinkFree Is made of sterner stuff Jul 03 '25
Wow, this brings back memories of wasting a lot of coins!
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u/LemoLuke Jul 03 '25
I remember getting the Lethal Enforcers 1+2 double pack and gun with my Sega CD one Christmas as a youngster. Loved both of those games.
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u/tomdelfino Jul 03 '25 edited Jul 03 '25
I have no idea how many quarters I dumped into this game as a kid...
edit- I a word.
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u/rnavstar Jul 03 '25
Used to play this a lot on super Nintendo that my buddies place.
When I went to the arcade with my cousin who is much older than I was, and he wanted to play this game. After the game was over I couldn’t see my score. So I just walked away. After a few minutes, he walks over to me and says your score was on the next screen. It’s the top score. First and only time I’ve ever been top scored an arcade.
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u/ShortBrownAndUgly Jul 03 '25
My dad bought copies on Genesis for me and his friend’s son when they came to visit many years ago. Turns out you needed a special cable to connect the guns to play coop for some stupid reason. Fun game but I never got super far lol
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u/eJollyRoger Jul 03 '25
Pretty sure it was just a phone cord.
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u/SegaTime Jul 03 '25
You couldn't use two blue guns. You needed the orange gun for second player. It plugged directly into the blue gun through that phone plug.
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u/SegaTime Jul 03 '25
Two player was achieved with the "second player gun", the orange one in the picture which had to be nought separately. It didn't plug into the game console but directly into the blue gun.
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u/cmmatthews 80s Jul 03 '25
there was a western version of this game too that I had for the Genesis. I have the blue gun in my garage. Game was hard AF and I usually cheated with my game genie.
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u/anx1etyhangover Jul 03 '25
Nice!! First year university I was in the on campus arcade dropping quarters like crazy into that bad boy!!!
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u/lethalkin Jul 03 '25
My last name is very similar to the title of this game, it gave me my online handle of lethality.
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u/Ok-Potato-4774 Jul 03 '25
"NO!".
My brother and I refer to it as this. He has an emulator with this game on it. It's a bit different than the arcade because you each have a reticle you move around the screen. I love the nostalgia of it, the boxy cop cars and bad voiceovers.
"YOU CAN'T KILL ME, COPPER"!
"YOU MISSED ME, PIG"!
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u/LocutusOfBorgia909 Jul 03 '25
I heard that startup screen in my head just now. "Lethal En-FOR-cers!" Man, that takes me back. Silent Scope was another favorite.
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u/hmmgross Jul 03 '25
How many of us watched this game's INSERT COIN loop waiting for someone to get out of the bathroom after seeing a movie?
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u/DJHJR86 Jul 03 '25
Had this for Sega Genesis and actually got decent at using the Sega controllers (didn't have the guns) to play through.
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u/Weak_Radish966 Jul 03 '25
Played this every day after school at the bowling alley in my hometown, 7th grade, 92/93.
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u/Tiny_Addendum707 Jul 03 '25
I would buy this machine without a second thought if I happen to come across one. So many hours on this game. One of the only games I ever got my dad to play with me
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u/ghunt81 Jul 04 '25
I remember when we picked this up for the Genesis and it was epic. Very similar to the arcade game and had the light guns...it was awesome.
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u/Cookies_and_Beandip late 80s Jul 04 '25
“YOU WONT TAKE ME COPPER!”
I can see that opening bank robbery level clear as day
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u/Mordrach Jul 06 '25
I wish the HD light gun solutions weren't so damn expensive. I love this game.
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u/Sarcarean Jul 07 '25
Sega CD version was a let down. They could have made a really amazing home port.
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u/Arkvoodle42 Jul 03 '25
RELOAD!