The Game: Trapped in a maze full of HallMonsters, you are adventurer Winky, on a mission to snatch incredible treasures from hazardous underground rooms inhabited by lesser beasts such as re-animated skeletons, goblins, serpents, and so on. Sometimes even the walls move, threatening to squish Winky or trap him, helpless to run from the HallMonsters. The deeper into the dungeons you go, the more treacherous the danger – and the greater the rewards. Just remember two things – the decomposing corpses of the smaller enemies are just as deadly as the live creatures. And there is no defense – and almost never any means of escape – from the HallMonsters. (Coleco, 1982)
Memories: Coleco was widely rumored to be deliberately making its third-party games for Atari and Intellivision total stinkers – look up the 2600 version of Donkey Kong or the even more miserable Intellivision version sometime. But Venture for the VCS was a bit of a surprise: it wasn’t a total stink bomb of a game.
Simplified? You betcha. Venture was never a marvel of audiovisual delights in the arcade, so the translation to home consoles was smoother than usual. It’s lacking some of the finer details, so it’s not going to blow the ColecoVision Venture out of the water anytime soon, but it’s adequate. This Venture is closer to arcade Venture than 2600 Pac-Man is to arcade Pac-Man. Or maybe that’s not saying much.
The game play is a close approximation of the arcade, and the graphics aren’t far behind. What more can you ask for in the home version of an arcade game? Rare kudos to Coleco for one of its 2600 ports.