I had this very game when I was five years old and it certainly hasn’t changed one bit. There’s nothing particularly special about it, other than its insane difficulty. To get you through the insanity, you need some guns. Your PS controller’s buttons act as a directional shooting pad for the game. The triangle button is up, the circle is right, the square is left and the X is down. There’s nothing special outside of those controls, as you don’t get a bomb to set off if the going gets tough, and it takes a lot of patience, and a bit of timing, to fire in the correct direction you want at the precise moment you want it. Again, the controls aren’t difficult, it’s the button pushing at the exact time that takes a bit of getting use to. Now, with that said, there are little ‘ENERGY’ modules scattered throughout the levels that allow you become invincible for a short amount of time. When you touch them then you can slam your ship into other ships, the environment or pretty much anything you want. When you’re getting close to running out of ‘ENERGY’ a harsh voice tells you to be careful. While my feeble memory cannot recall the home version ever sporting voice commands, it certainly seemed to fit the antique bill of Vanguard.
So what about the presentation? Early 1980s. Some of the boards flicker, once in a while you’ll find the animation is a bit off, and if you look really closely you can see black boxes surrounding the oncoming enemy ships; I’m not entirely sure what those boxes are, but they certainly add to the nostalgic feeling that Vanguard emits.