| VENTURE (COLECO) |
 
Venture was a Arcade Action adventure game made by Exidy in 1981. It basically had you roaming around a maze as a smiley face named "Winky", where you could roam into various "rooms" and kill the inhabitants and snag the treasure for high score. The game seems to mix elements of "Adventure" and "Berzerk" together to create an interesting atmosphere.
In 1982, Coleco ported it to the Colecovision, Atari 2600, and Intellivision. The 2600 port was programmed by Joseph Biel. The basic gameplay is that you are in this area that's separated into something like four different rooms. Each room contains up to three enemies or some kind of obstacle, and then some kind of treasure within. Outside of these rooms are more robots/creatures/what-have-you that sort of bobble around Homestar Runner style patrolling, on the lookout for you, so you have to avoid them (not too hard). Venture has a great following in the Atari communities but is not nearly as recognized or mentioned compared to the usual suspects like Pitfall, Pac-Man, E.T., and whatnot.Berzerk II? - My Experiences I picked this up at a thrift shop years ago on impulse buy and have played it a few times. I remembered playing it in an emulator and being somewhat surprised by it's complexity for a 2600 game, and liking it because it combined the elements of two of my favorites (Berzerk, Adventure). I was further more encouraged because the retro community tended to talk about how great it was for years. See, I've been an active participant - to some extent at least, in classic gaming since 1995 - when I was 12. So I've watched everything from the days of the 2600 Connection posting pictures of women in tight clothes exercising while playing Atari, to the beginning of AtariAge, Atari Protos, and other long-standing sites, some of which I still visit. TBH, the Atari 2600 was one of the first consoles to be a part of some kind of online retro-gaming community, and back then, we called them "Vintage Video Games" not "retro-gaming" or "classic gaming". So of course, this copy showed up at the local game shop and I bought it for what probably passes as a "good deal" on bananas in this time of high inflation. I will probably do a deep dive on this one at some point, and did a few rounds the other night.Videos |
