"(Foghorn Leghorn voice): 'Nice game, but seems a little confused.'"

Back when my vocabulary was more entertaining guesswork than knowledge, and I sympathized with Curious George making words like blimlimlim,(although I dreaded the prospect of having to learn vocabulary I held out hopes that words like quexipetic had actual meaning) I guessed that Vanguard really should have something to do with guarding a van, yet upon first glance the game seemed so much more exciting! There were no vans, and you didn't guard, you shot whatever got in your way! Yet for some reason I was intimidated by the game overall, figuring that it was best reserved for Advanced Video Game experts, like 19-year-olds with mullets(''the seedy crowd'' according to my mother) or glum 23-year-old graduate students. So I never got around to playing it, although I remembered snatches of tunes and pictures. When I finally had the opportunity, I wasn't disappointed knowing the limits of games played in 1981. It's a scroller game--mostly you go to the right but sometimes you'll go diagonally, and for the home stretch of a level the game scrolls up, and you must simply avoid the monsters that are thrown at you as well as the space equivalent of walls. The game's big hook is that you control the shooting with one hand(four buttons shoot in four directions) and the movement with the other as you shoot past waves of similar monsters. At the end there's a boss you can usually kill by accident, especially if you start shooting right away. Then the monsters get more numerous, and the pace gets faster.

I've mentioned the quirk about the controls; this is particularly useful when you find that when you and an enemy shoot each other, the shots cancel out(in fact, your shot dies if it touches any non-monster)--do this ad absurdum and you will crash, so ducking and firing up is useful to learn. The joystick allows diagonal movement, and you can actually move around a good deal of the screen, almost to the far right, although that is dangerous. If you try to move back your fighter stays in place horizontally, i.e. if you've passed an object you can't go back to pick it up. Still, knowing when to lead and when to stay back is good, and you don't want to get trapped on the edges. It's a good extension of, say, Galaxian's ''stay away from the edges.''

The game is laid out decently with perhaps a bit too short of a pause between stages in a level. I'll give a synopsis of the first level: you start out facing white-and-blue space fighters, but there is an energy bar your ship can pick up that will render the enemies purple and you invincible. From there it's a fun dodgem game until you hear a siren. This repeats for a while, although the space fighters get replaced with similarly colored jet planes. You then go on a diagonal up where white orbs with blue lining bounce up and down, back to the right where you encounter more space fighters and jet fighters without the energy luxury, down and right fighting purple orbs with blue outlines, and then to a big point-scoring scene with energy boosts where the screen forces you to go to an upper or lower path several times. From there it's another diagonal with white orbs, and then for the final vertical part you face ringers for vermicious Knids from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator before some dart-shaped ships fly down at you. For the home stretch you have to be careful shooting enemies as their explosions can kill you. From there it's pretty easy to knock off the boss, but even if you lose the fight you go to the much faster level two. The game also has an interesting feature where you can continue as far as you need through level one, but on level two, you're not allowed--and it also allows ten letters for each member in the ''top seven club'' of high scorers.

The graphics and sound are really nice for the time, despite some oddities, the major one being that collision detection is rotten, although thankfully it is in the player's favor. Your ship looks like a Christmas tree that got red and green swapped, but there are many other players. But there is a nice zoom-out picture in the upper right that tracks your progress. As you go through the level, there are several different backgrounds; the walls start out as blocks, then change to a sort of chain-link on the edge, and the scenes with the orbs have a sort of cliff-like effect. The big-point regions have bizarre vertical yellow lines, and the home stretch where you go up has stalactites and stalagmites--rotated a quarter turn, of course. The enemies are also pretty neat if a bit heavy on the white/blue/purple scheme. Not until the knids and darts at the end is this broken. The boss scene's a bit too minimalist, but stuff like being able to take out walls by shooting monsters(they are invulnerable to walls) or by running through them when invincible is rather fun. And the big-points scene has some cool stuff even if you have no clue what it is. The sound has neat marching tunes at the start of a stage in a level and when you're invincible.

Vanguard is still entertaining and worth a go. The relatively revolutionary shooting and variety of monsters made up for some weird defects, and the tunes are pretty jazzy. But there are concepts in Vanguard that are, quite frankly, bass ackwards. The vast majority of your scoring occurs in the scenes where you just have a lot of energy and monsters wouldn't shoot even if you did. The collision detection is silly, and the game offsets your timing a bit unfairly. The boss is easier than any wave of planes. Still it's a fun shooter which allows you the alternate route of sneaking by, and even in the high-points area you have a choice of paths, which was relatively innovative.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 09/20/01, Updated 09/20/01