Game: Vigilante
Console: Sega Master System
Developer: Irem
Release Date: 1988
With just 5 stages, Vigilante is a relatively short Beat Em Up, released in 1988 for quite a few consoles, including the Atari ST and Commodore 64. The version I'm playing however, is for Sega Master System. The premise here is that your girlfriend "Maria" (Maddonna in arcades) has been kidnapped by some "Rogues" and its up to you to rescue her. You begin on a wild west style street, and progress, beating up enemies as you go, through a junkyard, a city, a building site, and finally some scaffolding.
The enemies aren't too difficult to beat, most of the time a good crotch-punching will take a down the toughest of brutes, even the bosses. There's not really too much strategy involved either, the most you have to do is time your duck so that you miss a bullet coming toward you. Some levels are shorter than others and you can confuse most of the enemies in the levels by walking to the right without attempting to fight them, and jumping which will cause them to forget you even exist.
The music on the game is forgettable 8-bit fare, not too annoying thankfully, and the graphics aren't bad for the era, the backgrounds are interesting most of the time and there's a nice variation in the look of the enemies, even if you can take them all down in the same fashion. It doesn't take long to complete, start to finish I timed about 20 minutes, but I'm sure it could be done faster.
Overall its a little bit of fun, with some flaws, but it won't irritate you beyond belief.
Score: 56/100
Rank: D
Game: Action Fighter
Console: Sega Master System
Developer: Sega
Release Date: 1986
Contrary to the title, Action Fighter is primarily a Driving/Flying game, with shooting elements. The player begins on a motorbike, travelling down a road (from a top-down view), hitting traffic even slightly will cause you to veer off the road and explode into a million pieces if you're unlucky. Sometimes the motorbike will manage to stay on the road, but its not an exact science. In the bottom right hand corner, there's a timer which counts down from 999.
As the player progresses, at seemingly random intervals, letters appear on the road, which if collected will transform the motorbike into a car. This is better at staying on the road, and has a double shot, compared to the motorbike's single shot. There are also SEGA vans driving the roads which will give you upgrades also. Considering that the first mission objective is to sink 3 ships, you'd be forgiven for wondering why you seem to be playing transformers instead.
Of course when you reach a certain point, your car transforms into an aeroplane. Like any regular car would. You're then able to sink the ships and move on to the next objective, provided the timer hasn't run out, leaving you with only 2 chances to be hit before failure. I used a cheat code to get further into the game, as progression after the timer runs out is pretty difficult. In a lot of ways level 2, 3 and 4 are pretty much the same as level 1. The same music, (different tracks for driving and flying, but both as painful as eachother), the same enemies, the same backgrounds.
Really the game is too difficult without cheats, and too boring to want to progress further anyway. The only things that change are the bosses, and you have to play through ridiculously long stages to get to them. Stage 4 started in the air, then we landed, and took off again, and I still didn't make it to the boss. I think one of the problems for this game is that it can't decide what it wants to be, Outrun is more of a fun driving game and Afterburner is more fun for flying. Its not unplayable, but there's no real reason you'd want to play it for more than 5 minutes.
Rating: 37/100
Grade: E
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