I’m a firm believer in the philosophy that “Just because a game is hard doesn’t make it bad.” But what most gamers forget is that the opposite is true as well, that just because a game is easy doesn’t make it good. Games with simple tasks and challenges aren’t such much “bad” as they are annoying. “Venture” is a good example of this, since it’s a game that has some challenge to it, but once I realized I had cleared it in just a few minutes on the first try - I felt cheated.
PRESS FIRE TO START
The setting is of the swords & sorcerers, medieval fantasy genre. You play as an archer named Winky, who must raid several catacombs for their treasures. I don’t know what’s funnier - the fact the hero is named Winky, or that he looks exactly like the Kool-Aid Man sans handle.
The actual gameplay involves two map screens, each containing four rooms with a bunch of ghosts floating around protecting them (which look eerily like the ones from “Pac-Man”). The goal is to make your way into each treasure room without getting caught by the “Hall Monsters” on the map screens; nor by the skeletons, snakes, griffins and the occasional moving walls within the rooms themselves. You are also at the mercy of the clock while in the treasure rooms, because if you dawdle, a scary skull will swoop down and destroy you and there’s nothing you can do about it.
You earn points by grabbing the treasures and shooting the enemies (but only AFTER you’ve looted the place). Why the game uses a point system without ever awarding you a 1-Up is a bit curious.
PLAYER 1 – READY!
I may have made it sound as though “Venture” is a finite game, but it’s in the tradition of the vintage Sisyphus-style where after completing the game it simply starts over at a higher level of difficulty until all your lives are exhausted. You only have four total lives to play the game with, but most likely you’ll only need one to beat all eight rooms.
To its credit, I must mention the fact it has four difficulty selections, but the only difference is that the enemies move quicker. This is what happens as you advance anyway, so you might as well start at the easiest setting.
JOYSTICKING
It’s a fairly easy task to outmaneuver the ghosts on the map screens, but trying to fight the enemies in the treasure rooms is either a cakewalk or hard as hell. It’s simple at the lower levels of challenge because the enemies move fairly slowly and there’s a LOT of empty space in which to avoid them.
However, “Venture” is virtually unplayable at higher levels of difficulty because you’ll always move at a snail’s pace while the enemies are bouncing off the walls! Speeding up the enemies is fine, but shouldn’t the player’s movements be increased as well? It worked wonders for most early arcade games, why not for here?
The other major problem is that you must move towards an enemy in order to shoot it (not the safest or the most practical strategy). Not surprisingly, the “one shot at a time” rule is in effect here, too. You’d better have good aim and timing, because if you miss, you’ll have to wait for your shot to either hit a wall or simply fade out. The Atari 2600 port of “Space Invaders” had the exact same flaw and it’s equally annoying here.
SPRITES & PIXELS
The gameplay is what hurts “Venture” the most, but at least the visuals are decent. The background is always black and the colors used for the characters are fairly brightly colored. The monsters definitely look like monsters, but why does Winky have to be a red smiley face? Isn’t he supposed to be some burly, bare-chested behemoth?
During the map screens Winky is a PIXEL. That’s right, a single solitary dot (and I thought the block character in Atari’s “Adventure” game was small). Near-sighted players – you have been warned!
CHIPPED TUNES
There’s nothing especially good or bad about the sound aspect to this game. It does contain quite a variety of sounds to make it aurally satisfying and complimentary to the visuals.
INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE
“Venture” is the kind of game you’ll find the need to finish once but when you do you might be disappointed at how quickly you did it. You could increase the difficulty to challenge yourself, but doing so only makes the game more frustrating than anything else. If it were more fun in general it would have something of a replay value, but as it stands it’s a one-and-done kind of game.
GAME OVER
What makes the game so disappointing is that it’s either too easy to too hard. There’s no middle ground, so the gameplay isn’t fun.
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