NSLE

They’re not enforcers and they’re not lethal either.

The Benson twins (Matt and Jay) got hold of a handheld video recorder that took those mini-VHS tapes, Browny (Grey Browne) had a digitizer for his Amiga 1200. This was complimented by his parents’ pretty decent VHS player, one with 4 heads, frame by frame advance and minimal tracking fuzz. And I was a pretty good Amos programmer by this point, it being my main hobby, and had an 8-bit audio sampler. Combine the lot and we you could actually digitize audio and video animation frame by frame and make a game like Mortal Kombat or Lethal Enforcers.

We decided to start with a Lethal Enforcers clone. Being totally unoriginal kids and naming by committee, we called it “Not So Lethal Enforcers.” Yeah the cringe is strong. It was grey and only had 16 shades, and there weren’t enough animation frames to go around, we didn’t have guns so the square chair leg shotgun is pretty obvious. And Jay took his shoes off between frames while doing a roll and we had to paint it back on. If I remember correctly the only audio we recorded was… uh… Dave Gary or me maybe? Squeaking “don’t shoot” when they pop up with their hands in the air. But we did actually finish writing the game.

It was a team effort, and unlike building parallel connectors so we could play Hired Guns multiplayer at a LAN party before LANs were a thing, we had something to show for it.

Or we would if I could find the ADF file. Pretty sure I uploaded it to aminet, but it’s not in the archives.

We never did finish Immortal Wombat (but I’ve probably got the plasticine wombat video frames somewhere), or our Eye of the Beholder engine, or the Bomberman clone either. But if I can find the video and audio for those I’ll put them on here too.