Uploaded April 2022 | Updated September 2026, 13 minutes ago
Lethal Weapon by Ocean, played from Tape
This is a perfectly adequate platform game (I have a joystick with a second fire button mapped to up, which helps with these!), but two things stand out about it to me:
a) It's an ocean release without the ocean loader!
b) It's clearly unfinished, despite this being a retail tape copy
The latter can be seen most prominantly in many online screenshots as well during the title copyright message, proudly claiming the game was made in "AIIB" - if you convert that text to digits, it would actually be "1992", but they never bothered to add numbers to the font - which, presumably, would have been done at some point, as well as replacing the obviously temporary and wired ocean logo with a proper one.
But there is more - for example, the McGuffins that you're supposed to collect in the game seem _entirely optional_ - the manual says you should get them, but they don't do anything. They don't even give you points. They're just.... there. Given that you're supposed to explore the level to find them, but this seems completly optional, I assume the plan was to have you colelct at least some percentage of them to progress. Which would, in this style of game, totally make sense!
Also, the tape mastering commits the usual sin of "rewind tape to start, you might as well restart your computer", a hallmark of in-a-hurry.
The most damning evidence for this, however, is that 1992 date - the game came out around May 1993, which says that they were running _very_ late with the release of this. Given that date, and the fact the sunset of the boxed commercial game market (I believe this to be ocean's second to last game, just barely predating sleepwalker - by around a month) was not just fast approaching, but basically here, I'd be shocked if they didn't just put what they had onto a tape in a panic, and ship it out, especially when they'd paid for such an expensive license.
As an aside, I do believe this was also the second to last game released to budget by the Hit Squad (the last being Cool World, weirdly - though that was earlier on full price), but on this I could be wrong - reviews were starting to get sketchy by that point (we're now in early 1994), and it could well be that this was acutally the last (the other contender is WWF European Rampage)
Lethal Weapon by Ocean, played from Tape
This is a perfectly adequate platform game (I have a joystick with a second fire button mapped to up, which helps with these!), but two things stand out about it to me:
a) It's an ocean release without the ocean loader!
b) It's clearly unfinished, despite this being a retail tape copy
The latter can be seen most prominantly in many online screenshots as well during the title copyright message, proudly claiming the game was made in "AIIB" - if you convert that text to digits, it would actually be "1992", but they never bothered to add numbers to the font - which, presumably, would have been done at some point, as well as replacing the obviously temporary and wired ocean logo with a proper one.
But there is more - for example, the McGuffins that you're supposed to collect in the game seem _entirely optional_ - the manual says you should get them, but they don't do anything. They don't even give you points. They're just.... there. Given that you're supposed to explore the level to find them, but this seems completly optional, I assume the plan was to have you colelct at least some percentage of them to progress. Which would, in this style of game, totally make sense!
Also, the tape mastering commits the usual sin of "rewind tape to start, you might as well restart your computer", a hallmark of in-a-hurry.
The most damning evidence for this, however, is that 1992 date - the game came out around May 1993, which says that they were running _very_ late with the release of this. Given that date, and the fact the sunset of the boxed commercial game market (I believe this to be ocean's second to last game, just barely predating sleepwalker - by around a month) was not just fast approaching, but basically here, I'd be shocked if they didn't just put what they had onto a tape in a panic, and ship it out, especially when they'd paid for such an expensive license.
As an aside, I do believe this was also the second to last game released to budget by the Hit Squad (the last being Cool World, weirdly - though that was earlier on full price), but on this I could be wrong - reviews were starting to get sketchy by that point (we're now in early 1994), and it could well be that this was acutally the last (the other contender is WWF European Rampage)
