"Venture"

Dark dungeons.  Hideous monsters.  

Fiendish traps.  Priceless treasures.  

Winky™.

Yes, they're all part of ColecoVision's newest home-gaming brainstorm, Venture!

Venture puts you in the shoes of a fearless treasure hunter named Winky™, although shoes may not be the right word since Winky™ appears to be an orange circle with a bow and arrow bolted to his head.  Or body.  Er... bolted to him.  And not only is Winky™ a brash, never-say-die adventurer, he's a happy one!  Just look at that smile!

Simply flipping through the instruction booklet, I just couldn't wait to play with my Winky™!  What kind of adventures would we have?  What dangers would we face?  What secrets would we uncover?  The lady on the bus couldn't answer these questions for me, in fact, she got up and changed seats.  So, when I got home, I popped the cartridge in and grabbed the controller.

Here's what Level One looks like at the outset.  Four rooms, some big, purple blocks, and the deadly, never-tiring Hallmonsters™, bent on putting an end to all five of my Winkies™.

Here's a close-up.  My Winky™ looks positively miniscule next to that Hallmonster™, don't you think?  I felt inadequate at first, but I quickly discovered that, although small, my Winky™ was lightning fast, and that would be the key to winning this game.

In the first room I ventured into, some dancing blueberries tried to stop me from stealing their bowl of rice.  I felt a little bad, invading the happy berries home, slamming arrows into their soft, defenseless bodies, and stealing their rice, but after I realized they only had two sets of chopsticks, I figured one of them would have starved to death anyway.

Well, this WALL ROOM doesn't look too bad.  I don't see any monsters, just some slowly moving walls.  Piece of cake!  That diamond the size of my body... er, head... er... that big diamond soon would be mine!

Ow!  That wall crushed my Winky™!  It seems that monsters aren't the only thing to fear in this dungeon.  Everything is a threat to my little adventurer.

At this point, it seemed obvious that Winky™ had two expressions:

Happy...

...and dead!

Next, I entered the SERPENT ROOM, where three snakes were guarding an apple.  Hmmm.  Serpents.  Apples.  Where do these crazy ColecoVision game wizards come up with this stuff?  I'm sure I don't know.

After killing the snakes and stealing their... forbidden fruit, I guess you could call it, I took a breather.  Since the room was clear of monsters, it seemed like a safe place to take a rest and decide where to unleash my Winky™ next.  Moments later, however, a Hallmonster™ entered the room!  Yikes!  Luckily, I wasn't tiny and powerless now, and I fired an arrow straight and true into the monster's evil heart.

Um... oops.  Well, it seems Winky™ can't hurt the Hallmonsters™.  Crap™.

I managed to finish all four rooms, and moved on to higher, or I suppose, lower levels of dungeons, my Winky™ at the ready...

Wow, just look at the size of this room, compared with my tiny Winky™!  It must take forever to navigate its massive square footage!  I quickly plunged inside!

Huh.  Maybe not.  Well, this is a dungeon of mystery... the size of the rooms could easily shift and change, becoming much smaller once entered with no need for further explanation.  Sounds like something those brilliant Coleco programmers would come up with!

"The crabs got my Winky™ and I was denied the doll."

Boy, how many times have I said that?

The game wore on, throwing all sorts of challenges in front of my happy little Winky™.

"Sorry you had to die, but I really need to borrow your gravy boat!"

"In the land of the Winky™, the one-eyed man is impaled with an arrow."

Despite the gruesome task of shooting living humanoid creatures point-blank in the face, Winky™ is still happy.  And one hell of a shot, by the looks of things.  

"C'mon-c'mon-c'mon-c'mon move-move-MOVE-MOVE HURRY MOVE STUPID DEAD DEMON MOVE"

Here we see the DRAGON ROOM!  Dragons.  Wow.  How many grand adventures end with the confrontation between a hero and a dragon?  In all of legend, what more powerful, mythical, and deadly beast exists?

Well, we won't find out here, because this DRAGON ROOM only contains some HOPPING SHEEP.

"Baaa."

There's much, much more to this game, but all in all, Venture delivers on its promise of high-adventure, multi-limbed blueberries, highly repetitive game-play, and treasures of questionable value.  It is, quite simply, a masterpiece.  

After playing Venture, my thoughts turned, as they often do, to the future.  The best part of Venture, I think, is the utter simplicity of the game, something I hope will not change in days to come.

Winky™ has just one weapon, a bow and arrow, and the monsters take only one shot to kill.  That's all we, as home-gamers, want.  It's all we need.  I mean, what if some day, action games provided a selection of weapons for our hero?  Maybe, I don't know, ten of them, just to pick a number at random.  Starting with something relatively simple like a knife or crowbar, and escalating into more dangerous and deadly weapons, such as a pistol, shotgun, machine-gun, rail-gun, shredder, flame-thrower, rocket launcher, and then some absurdly powerful weapon that kills all the monsters in the room.  Where's the challenge in that?  

I mean, maybe if the monsters themselves become more powerful, and take several, perhaps dozens of hits to kill, particularly the, um... I guess you would call it the "Boss" monster, at the end of each level.  Or something.  Suppose each boss had a weakness for a different type of weapon, and that single weapon might make killing him a little easier.  Heh.  I'm sorry, listen to me ramble absurdly!  If you had ten different weapons, you would certainly need ammunition, and that would require game designers to scatter ammo throughout each level, almost haphazardly, say hidden inside crates or perched on hard-to-reach ledges, or even just lying out on the floor in plain sight.

And judging from these clever game designers at ColecoVision, I really don't see anything like that happening.