Venture

"Not sure why the protagonist is still smiling over THIS arcade port...."

With Atari having already pocketed your money, you'd think they'd make a game approximately as difficult as the arcade, even if it is not possible to port the full details. However, in a relatively simple game like Venture, Atari's graphics fall flat, there are several annoying bugs, and the game is flat out too hard. Your task, as Winky, a smiley face with a bow and arrow(whittled down to a dot) is to enter each of four rooms in a level, get by the monsters(there are usually three. You can shoot them, but you can't step over their decayed bodies--which take a while to disappear--and live,) pick up a treasure, and get out before the speedy and annoying and indestructible hall monster gets to you. The opening is really neat as you have a choice of order to visit the rooms, and how you enter/leave the room/hall influences where you are when you switch views--however, you must clear each one out before you advance to the next level, which has a different layout and different colors and monsters inside the room. You'll also want to avoid hall monsters that don't even want to let you in the rooms--they will take a life. One nice thing is that if you exit and then enter a room, it will be reset to its original state. An example of the rooms you will face: level one has a bunch of walls that move towards and away from a diamond, and you must sneak in to get it. There are c-shaped rooms with treasures tucked in the corner and one l-shaped, with skeletons and snakes and robots(cyclops?) guarding a crown, a treasure chest, and an apple.

The gameplay is frustrating, lacking many simple details that the arcade game includes and that I don't see why Atari could not have, either. Winky can fire(his arrows have limited range) in the direction he's moving or last moved, and while in the arcade your arrows have width, they are one pixel wide off the home console. Given that when you bounce against a wall in a room you can't go forward(except if you go down and left,) this makes it tough to shoot monsters who stay against a wall. Also you do not see how close the monsters are to decaying--granted, it's easier to see this in the arcade version which has more memory, but it's one more way the program keeps you in the dark. Then, when you are in the hall, you will have to remember which rooms you have solved and thus can't enter. The arcade version makes this clear by filling them solidly with the wall color--with Atari, you just see the room's general shape with the walls, and only your little dot bouncing into the doorway will inform you that you'd forgotten you'd finished the room. There are other minor annoyances, like how in the first-level diamond room where the walls expand and shrink, touching them will knock you out of the room in the arcade but kill you on the Atari. This is not a technology limitation, as is not being able to shoot the walls(you can do so on the arcade.) It's also annoying that the monsters can step over their comrades' carcasses. Most critical is that you may be killed by a monster that doesn't even seem to be touching you--the rectangles that contain your graphics overlap, and even though you're a circle you're still history. What's also not very nice is that you don't get as many points for your exploits off the Atari as off the arcade.

The graphics are tolerable, besides the completed-room and monster-touching fiascos I mentioned above. You can tell what the monsters and treasures are for the most part, and for the Atari that's pretty good.

Venture for the Apple is not very user-friendly and not friendly to Winky. Although the arcade version has some neat later levels, the home version is just too hard on the easiest ones, which seems due to shocking neglect of the original by the programmers. The only strategy consists of going into a room, shooting, hoping you get lucky, and leaving and returning if you don't. Although comparing the two versions to see what makes a simple game good(or rotten) is an interesting intellectual exercise, it's not a tough one, unless you count the emotional strife that you will endure just trying to get to level two. Level three, if you get there, will annoy you too, since it is just a faster version of level one. All the neat ideas in this game belong to the original creator, and I don't know of one that passed through to the Atari port unblemished.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 11/19/00, Updated 11/19/00