Total Vice (Arcade) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Konami's 1997 arcade light-gun shooter, Total Vice.

Played on the default difficulty level.

Total Vice is, in my opinion, one of Konami's best arcade games of the late 1990s. It's a light turn-based rail shooter that feels like it was the intended successor to the Lethal Enforcers name, and it's a game that would've served the series far better than what Lethal Enforcers 3 (a game that felt like a pseudo-sequel to Police 911) did.

Unfortunately, the game never garnered much in the way of buzz, and has been largely forgotten to time. It ran on an exotic bit of hardware (based on the M2 platform) that saw very little public exposure, and to this day, it has never been ported to any other platforms. What a shame that is, too - this would've posed an excellent bit of competition to Time Crisis had it been ported to the PlayStation.

It's a basic and pure as the genre gets: you point a light gun at the screen, shoot the baddies, and reload by shooting off-screen. That's it. No fancy bells-and-whistles, no gimmicks to complicate the carnage - it's a pure arcade shooter.

The move to 3D is successful here most likely due to how heavily it borrows from Virtua Cop, much like how Virtua Cop took many of its cues from Lethal Enforcers. Many of the scenes (the yard full of shipping containers, the elevator scene, the office building, and several others) highlight an endless number of elements "inspired" by Virtua Cop, but the game still feels a lot like Lethal Enforcers in its style and pace. It probably helps that many of the voice clips have been recycled from Lethal Enforcers - any self-respecting Konami fan will instantly recognize, "Eat lead, copper!"

It may not feature much in the way of originality, but it nails the basics, and it keeps things fun throughout. There are three main stages ("missions") to blast your way though, and like most arcade light gun shooters, it's quite difficult, but the 3D graphics and the heavy layer of cheese that coats the production make it a blast to play.

Unfortunately, it only ever saw a small production run so most people never got to experience this gem.

Though it runs fine through Mame, it struggles to run at full-speed on pretty much any PC at the moment. I had to use Mame's -aviwrite command to get a smooth recording - I was playing this on a i9 9980HK with 64GB of RAM and the game ran only at 60-70% of its original speed most of the time. Ouch.

But if you ever see this one out in the wild, feed it some coins. Total Vice could certainly use a bit of love.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!