Format: HuCard
Genre: Brawler
Developer: Irem
Publisher: NEC

Vigilante's player character is quite large, and all of the combat animations, from punches to high kicks to nunchuku attacks, are well animated. The backgrounds are all hand drawn and well done, although the PC Engine version of the game doesn't utilize quite as many colors-- a fact which also applies to the game's various bad guys. The game has the gritty look fit for the genre, but the title's overall appearance is simple, and generally uninteresting.

The Vigilante arcade board utilizes the same Yamaha YM2151 chip that is in Sega's period arcade hardware. Pleasingly, the spunky music actually sounds better on the PC Engine's sound chip, which brings out the raw quality of the compositions. This port's sound effects sound ok, but the PC Engine's sound chip simply could not reproduce the voice samples in the crystal clear quality of the arcade version.

Unlike most brawlers, Vigilante's mechanics are more like those of a 2d fighter-- with "up" resulting in a jump, and "down" in a crouch. There are only six total moves, plus the ability to pick up a nunchuku in each stage, and most of the gameplay involves repeatedly alternating left and right, punching the enemies off of the stage, while facing off against similarly straight forward bosses.

The PC Engine port of Vigilante is extremely faithful, with only small bits of animation missing, a simplified color palette, and scratchier voice samples. The game's intro is sadly censored-- take the "power" into your hands, as opposed to "law" (the ending however is not censored!)-- and the "van driving away" animation at the end of the stages is missing, omitting key contextual information for the player. But despite the overall excellent port, the source material is just not that good, even compared to its contemporaries in the genre.