Venture

Played enough Adventure? Then play Venture! Explore dungeons, defeat monsters, and collect treasure.

The cover of Venture features a barbarian dueling a giant serpent. Awesome! In reality, you play a smiley face named "Winky," which does not seem very "barbarian." But I don't care, because this is Atari, and the gameplay is solid in Venture.

I prefer the look of the Coleco cartridge, but the red label cart is the same game. (Atari re-released many Coleco titles in the later 80s.) I opened a shrink-wrapped red box (the wrap was falling off, anyway). Total joy to pull out a crisp, clean cartridge after all these decades. And worked great on first try!

Venture is challenging but rewarding. At first, you're a single pixel dot. Avoid the hall monsters and enter dungeons. Collect the treasure as fast as you can, because if you linger, a hall monster will enter and chase after you. It's a greenish skull face. You don't have to shoot all the monsters in the dungeons, fortunately, but stay clear of their exploded pixel bodies--the corpses will kill you, as if this wasn't challenging enough.

I enjoy the "moving walls" dungeon, because it's more of a trap or puzzle. In some ways, Venture reminds me of Zelda, with its many rooms, monsters, treasures, and traps.

My only complaint is when I leave a dungeon and a hall monster steps right onto me!

Venture is freaking awesome. I'm not very good (I can get to the blue dungeons), but I always come back for more. I imagine people once played this game for hours. Overall, this is an appealing Atari game. Venture leans more toward arcade action than casual adventure, but I don't see this as a detriment. This is a common and cheap cart, and every Atari player should have it in their rotation. This is also a good intro game to show off for an Atari newcomer. And so . . .

Final Venture review:

I recommend Venture to Atari newcomers, curious, nerds, and collectors.

Note: I apologize for the blurry photos, and hope to get a better phone with a better camera soonish!