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Funkmaster V Reviews
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7800 Rank: Unranked
Genre: Dungeon Crawler/ Maze Shooter
Awards: None
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Science Fact: Ugly People Are Better Looking The Further Away You Are From Them |
Pros:
The Best Version of Venture Ever Made
Cons:
It's Still Venture |
See What I Mean? Look at That Schmuck-Face In The Upper Right Hand Corner
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Overview: The knuckleheads at Video 61 have cooked up another Atari 7800 homebrew for us, this time bringing the seminal dungeon crawler Venture to the Prosystem.
This is a port that exudes love, but can't escape the fact that Venture itself is kind of a dorky game to begin with. Made after Berzerk but years before Dark Chambers and Gauntlet, the original Venture struggled with bringing that middle earth flava to the screen with the graphical capabilities of 1981 arcade technology. Same here. Still, this is the best version of Venture that you will ever ever play.
Graphics:
We start off on the wrong foot here. While this port is a graphical improvement over its arcade muse, Venture was always a fugly fugly thing. After the impressive title screen, the first thing we see is a board with blobs that are supposed to be rooms, and Space Invader looking thugs shaking around aimlessly. Where are we? Oh... we are a tiny tiny dot at the bottom of the screen. Think the hero from Adventure's kid sister. The trick here is to avoid the indestructible hall monitors and sneak into a room to steal its treasure. Escape and repeat. Inside, things improve slightly... as this port's mystery gang of baddies are multicolored as opposed to the arcade's monochrome evil doers. However, the hero of Venture, a smiley face with a bow and arrow, may be the dumbest looking dork protagonist of any video game ever... including KC Munchkin, the kid from Super Skateboardin' and Crazy Otto. What a shit head.
Sound: Venture struggles with the audio department... both in the arcade and in the 7800 version. The fighting sound effects are fine, but the background "tunes" sound like a crazy person forgot how to play the piano. Familiar tunes play at key points... but poorly. For example, when our dork-ass hero picks up a treasure, the William Tell Overture plays... but not normally... no. It pants like some kid at a keyboard is trying to bang it out after hearing it twice: spaced out, poorly timed... and just plain weird.
Gameplay: After all of that thrashing, the gameplay was always Venture's strong suit, and the 7800 port is pretty flawless. The game is a simple multi- directional shooter with treasure collecting elements. Pretty fun, right? The different rooms offer mild but varying challenges. There are (in my estimation) 17 different groups of evil legends in the game... and some of their rooms offer different experiences which are fun to discover. Trolls exist where there's kind of a bridge/partition situation going on in their room, a Cyclops can disappear, when you collect a treasure in the spider room, spiders pop up everywhere. Some of the flipside runners come back to life, some are faster than others. But oftentimes, I'm disappointed in the lack of fight in some of these legends: dragons should really throw fire, Frankenstein's monsters should really take two shots to take down, etc. My favorite rooms are the ones with no enemies inside whatsoever, they either have an environmental puzzle or maze to figure out how to navigate. If you dork around a room long enough, one of the indestructible hall monitors come in, much like the Evil Otto from Berzerk, and you gotta escape before he kills you. HE REALLY WANTS TO SEE YOUR HALL PASS. There are four rooms per map and three maps per level. After defeating those three maps you do it all over again... this time with harder foes to deal with.
Interpretation: If you like Venture, this port will thrill you. This game has better graphics, more options, more enemies and more levels than the arcade, but definitely worse sound.
Value: Video 61, much like they did with their Putt Putt game, included a bunch of odd and sometimes confusing options for you to goof around with. There is an option to toggle between directional shooting and hold and release shooting... but who the hell wants to hold and release shoot? That's for charge shots in other types of games. You can start at different levels of the game. The difficulty selections are a bit oddly named, but they are interesting. Upon first glance, I assumed the Arcade version would be the most difficult... but it is in fact the easiest version. It features only three maps. The Atari XL/XE level features four maps, has the best, all original new rooms and the second highest difficulty. The 7800 difficulty is the most difficult and features a fifth map, although those new rooms aren't as interesting as the XE additions. So if you like Venture, playing on the 7800 challenge mode almost doubles your play experience verses the arcade. No wonder the dork with the arrow is smiling.
Overall: The 7800 version of Venture is a great port of a game that feels so dated it's hard to get too excited about in 2022. It's pretty tepid. I tripped the levels twice the first time I played it on Arcade difficulty. The 7800 difficulty is a bit more of a bruiser, but savvy retro dudes can clean out these dungeons of their spoils with relative ease. Well made, dorky looking, too easy, rife with weird audio and loaded with options and extras, Video 61's 7800 port of Venture is an uneven roll through the hay that will thrill Venture lovers but probably bore those without Venture nostalgia to tears. As Dwight Schrute says, "Nostalgia is truly one of the great human weaknesses...second only to the neck." Overall, this game should score anywhere between a 2.0 to a 5.0 depending on your feelings of the source material. At Atari 7800 Forever, we are gonna compromise with a 3.5.
Additional Info:
I would like to take this time to thank Video 61 for allowing the use of thier screenshots for this review. You can purchase this game at www.AtariSales.com.
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