Sort of review: Vigilante (Turbografx-16)

(This was an article for Wii Fanboy that I didn't end up using. It might be worth reading.)

Let's lay the "review" text out right now: Vigilante is not the best game on the Virtual Console. It wasn't the best game on the Turbografx-16 either. It's not at all the best side-scrolling brawler (beat-em-up, what have you.) Put next to games that are themselves old, like Final Fight and Streets of Rage, with their combos and their three-dimensional movement and their non-nunchaku weapons, Vigilante's simplistic gameplay is archaic. Simplistic can be fun, as long as you know what you're getting into; with the constant stream of one-hit-kill enemies, Vigilante can be hypnotically soothing and frantic at the same time.

But it is precisely because there has been so much progress since Vigilante that we should play Vigilante and try to understand its merits. It's one of those games that should be available, even if everyone isn't interested, and its presence is one of the more wonderful, promising things about Nintendo's download service.
Vigilante is notable as a historical item, at least-- a reminder of not only a long-dead genre, but an astoundingly specific subgenre: the "thousands-of-identical-guys-try-to-cling-to-you" side-scrolling brawler, of which we know only three examples: Kung Fu Master (Kung Fu on the NES,) basically the first brawler ever, (and also developed by IREM) and China Warrior, a digitized TG16 game from Hudson-- a game whose VC release we eagerly await so we can write about its hypnotic properties and big-spriteyness. Besides, anything that can be done to draw those with brawler predilections away from Urban Champion is basically a public service: nobody should buy Urban Champion, ever; not as a joke, not to fill a collection, not even for some weird article intended to present it as a game of historical interest.
The story is pretty standard arcade-game boilerplate: "The Skinheads have taken Madonna hostage. Take the power into your own hands!" Of course, by "Madonna" they mean "the protagonist's girlfriend" and not Madonna the pop star-- although people might still have been upset enough, back in 1989, to take some power into their own hands, if Madonna the pop star were kidnapped. Basically, games like this need the kidnapped girlfriend, because otherwise the story would be "You are a huge jerk who likes to walk in one direction and beat up people!" This was before the Grand Theft Auto series brought videogame jerks into fashion.
Vigilante's nuanced visual style, which features softly shaded characters with thick black outlines, is surprising. It's unusual-looking, and an unusually artistic flourish for a beat-em-up. The art is especially striking when compared to its flat, flat, flat NES predecessor, Kung Fu. It's a good thing such attention was paid to the character art, since the gameplay consists almost entirely of fighting thousands of clones of the same guy (with occasional bosses and a few different dudes with sticks,) and that guy needs to look kind of interesting.

So why should this simplistic old game be on the VC? Why should we care about a game with monotonous gameplay and a marginally interesting look? Why is this "game history" worth someone paying $6 for? More than just giving us the ability to play Mario Kart again, the Virtual Console, with its emphasis on older games rather than newly-developed casual content, has the potential to become an important service-- a Museum of Gaming, or even better, a distributed, distance-learning Library of Gaming. With a broad enough selection of games, it can be a way for all the new gamers who are buying Wiis catch up on the last 20+ years of game development.
And that includes the games that are not quite the "greatest hits." It has to. It especially includes games like this one that directly influenced whole genres. Nintendo's willingness to publish a game like Vigilante, that Wii Sports fans and people who remember Kid Icarus aren't exactly clamoring for, is a positive note for people hoping for a mechanism to preserve the collective memory of the video game hobby. Plus, sometimes it takes a not-so-good game to help us understand what is so good about the good ones.

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So, here's an exciting development! And by "exciting" I mean ""

Starting very soon, you'll be able to see my particular, flavorful blend of enthusiasm and searing, blinding hate on DS Fanboy and Nintendo Wii Fanboy!