Adventure

"First Adventure game for a videogame system... still fun!"

Adventure, for the Atari 2600, was designed as a graphical port of the computer text adventure game ''Colossal Cave Adventure'', some traces of that game still remain (The mazes, mainly) but the port idea was quickly rejected, because all of that simply didn't fit in a 2600 cartridge. Still, this game is fun, funnier than his PC predecessor.

Graphics: 4/10
There's not a lot this game could have done about the graphics, true... they're very artistic, but the flickering when there were lots of items damaged my eye too much, I think... but it's no biggie, graphics shouldn't matter in an adventure game.

Sound/Music: N/A
There's practically nothing aside from beeps.

Gameplay: 8/10
Now THIS is were it gets fun! Games mode 1 and 2 aren't very hard, but Game 3 is what made the game for me, it places all items at random, making your objective (Recovering the golden chalice and bringing it to the golden castle) much harder, in the way to the chalice, you'll have to deal with dragons, a thief bat, items that the bat has stuck in the walls (You can recover them with the magnet and the bridge, thanks god) and even a little easter egg! You'll have to use your wit in this game, I recommend getting the Atari Anthology for the PS2 version, though, because it implements ACTUAL randomness in the game, the atari 2600 seems like it only has some variatons on the normal game. Also, a cool thing in the game is that the other characters (Dragons and the bat) will actually move around the game world, picking items, looking for you, etc. every screen is actually connected, if the dragons kill you, you can resurrect yourself too, but you'll resurrect every dragon you have killed during the game too. Also, there are good rom hacks in webs that add more stuff for this game, I recommend specially Indenture, an enhanced remake for DOS.

Story: 5/10
Well... it's enough for a game like this, basically, you are some magical knight, and you have to recover the golden chalice, that has been stolen by some evil wizard, and the wizard created three dragons: The little yellow dragon that is scared of yellow keys Yorgle, the green dragon that appears always at the most unexpected times Grundle, and the red dragon that is very fast and will probably kill you before you know he's in the same room as you if you don't have the sword, and a thief bat who likes to swap items for (usually alive) dragons, and sometimes puts items in walls. Also, note that you never see the evil wizard during the game...

Replay Value: 10/10
As I said earlier, in game 3, you can replay the game as much as you like, the game will be different... in the PS2 version that is.

The Good:
-Fun gameplay, brains required for playing.
-First adventure game on videoconsoles!
-Every character/object can affect each other at every part of the world.
-First sandbox game ever aswell.
-First easter egg ever!

The Bad:
-Flickering graphics.
-Annoying sound.
-If you can't recover the magnet and the bridge, you are screwed.

The Ugly:
-Duck dragons!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/17/07

Game Release: Adventure (US, 1978)