Vigilante

Vigilante (ビジランテ?) is a 1988 beat 'em up arcade game developed and published by Irem in Japan and Europe and published in North America by Data East. It is considered as a spiritual sequel to Irem's earlier Kung-Fu Master.

Players control the titular character using punches and kicks to defeat the Skinheads in a 2D platform manner, while sometimes picking up and using nunchaku against them. If players get hurt while holding nunchuku, they become unarmed. There are five stages in order of appearance: a street, a junkyard, the Brooklyn Bridge, a back street scene and on top of a building that is under construction. Skinheads with Mohawk or spiked hairdo attack the vigilante with knives, chains, motorbikes, rifles and other kinds of weapons. They will also cling to him if he stands too close to them.

The arcade game was ported to many home computers and consoles. The Sega Master System version was ported and published exclusively in North America and Europe by Sega, and is one of several Master System games to include an FM sound switch for enhanced music quality. In this version, Madonna was renamed "Maria" and the Skinheads were called the "Rogues". The conversions for Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga and the Amstrad CPC were reprogrammed by Emerald Software and published by U.S. Gold mostly in Europe. The MSX version was ported and published by Korean company Clover. The TurboGrafx-16 version was ported and published in Japan on January 14, 1989 by Irem and published in North America by NEC the same year. This port matches the arcade more than other ports. The TurboGrafx-16 version was later re-released by Irem globally for Nintendo's Virtual Console for the Wii in 2007, and for the Wii U Virtual Console on February 10, 2015.