Street justice should get me my six dollars back: A review of Vigilante

Written by Jim Squires

Friday, 09 February 2007 04:30

Back when I was but a wee little lad I had a bit of a jones on for Kung Fu. Sure it may not have been the greatest game in the NES library, but it somehow got its claws in me and never let go. I guess it's those games that you play when you're 7 years old that really stick with you. To this day, it's still at the top of my VC want list, right up there with the good version of Punch-Out.

So when Hudson released Vigilante to the Virtual Console this Monday, I was more than a little curious. After all - this was the spiritual successor to Kung Fu! It was an unofficial sequel to the NES classic, but it had only ever surfaced on the TurboGrafx-16! How could I go wrong?

Pretty easily it turns out. Somehow they managed to take the simple punch and kick mechanics of Kung Fu and make them feel clunky and unpleasant. As a result, the difficulty in Vigilante is ramped up to painful right from the beginning. I found myself using up all of my continues in the first stage alone -- not exactly the hallmark of a playable game. Not only have the controls gotten clunky, but both the visuals and story have been crammed into that generic early-90's mold. Vigilante look like a dumbed down version of Final Fight or a suped-up version of Golden Axe, and the story has taken the simplicity of Kung Fu's (rescuing your girlfriend Sylvia from Mr. X) and perverted it to fit the hip and edgy molf of the 90's. Get this - You're rescuing Madonna from skinheads. Yikes.

Oh - and those comparisons to Golden Axe and Final Fight? I assure you, they're visual only. If this title offered the 4-direction movement of the standard beat-em up of the time, it might have been a little more bearable. But alas, it's a side scroller in the same genre as the original Kung Fu - and while Kung Fu made it work, Vigilante is too painfully generic and broken to be any fun. Besides - any games like this without the fantastic Kung Fu sounds - both the music and effects - just isn't worth its weight in salt no matter how hard it tries.

If you're still determined to play Vigilante after this review, you deserve what you get.

1 out of 10

Comments (2) Add Comment

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written by Dan Zuccarelli, February 09, 2007

yea, I could've warned you on this one...

I still have it for my TG-16, though I'll never play it

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written by Danny M, February 09, 2007

thnks for the tip...that WAS going to be my next VC game-not any more!

But what's with the backhand to Final Fight, that's one of the classics!!

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