One of my favorite genres of video games has to be shooting games. I’m not talking about first-person shooters like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4. I mean on-rails shooters where all you’re responsible for is aiming the gun and shooting the bad guys, pointing off the screen to reload and watching the entire screen flash every time to pull the trigger. Ah, the days of the light gun… how I miss thee…

I’ve played a lot of shooting games in my day, but one that holds a very special place in my heart is Lethal Enforcers. It was, I believe, the first shooting game to use actual people in the game. Animated still photographs (think GIF quality) would pop up on the screen and you’d shoot them using a plastic gun. This ain’t no zapper, it’s the “Konami Justifier.”

AI? What AI? The bad guys — all of whom wear sunglasses, gas masks, or ski masks — also pop up in the exact same places every time and in the same order, so if you had an exceptional memory, you could memorize the entire game and play accordingly. The “realistic” violence unleashed some controversy, much like Mortal Kombat, but that just made me want to play this game even more.

Realistically (no pun intended), Lethal Enforcers wasn’t the best shooting game of its time, but it did usher in a whole generation of “realistic” shooters, including Area 51, Terminator 2: The Arcade Game, and Revolution: X. Anyways, enjoy the nostalgic vid from ScrewAttack.

[Please visit Beyond the Rhetoric to view the video]