Adventure

Adventure for the Atari 2600 is quite a treat when setting the expectations of playing an Atari 2600 game. Its simplicity works in its favour, especially when compared to games with similar gameplay that have "better graphics" of the era like Superman.

With three levels of difficulty, the game starts you out with the basics of having to find the sword, grab the keys to enter castles, and occasionally do things like grab the magnet to rescue sometimes which you foolishly dropped within the walls while crossing a bridge. I dig the random occurrence of the dragons who always get your heart racing a bit when they give in to the chase (not unlike the ghosts in Pac-Man, the Ghosts in Super Mario Bros, or even the cops in Grand Theft Auto).

The first level is easy enough and after that, the real challenge begins with world two with an expanded world (including the foggy maze? or is it the foggy woods? hard to tell in this game) and multiple castles and mazes. Not to mention the bat who is constantly trading off keys for dragons to ruin your day.

For those who can manage that, World 3 provides the ultimate challenge with what feels like the first game randomizer where items are spewed everywhere. decades ahead of randomizers that grew popular in the 2010s with Zelda and Metroidvanias.

If there's a gripe, it's the gripe that comes with several Atari 2600 games: the screen flickers like a beast when too much action happens and as other viewers brought up, your tolerance on your character being a yellow square fighting the dragons who sometimes resemble ducks may be too much to people expecting a more contemporary (even by retro-looking game standards), but when the mood strikes to play some Atari 2600, this is one of the titles I return to the most.

Adventure is a masterpiece. It is a technical marvel considering the limitations of the VCS, it's credited as being the first adventure game, and it has the first Easter egg in gaming history. But it just doesn't hold up, and I don't believe in inflating ratings for games to take into account their age.

By today's standards, Adventure is rough. The level design defies logic, with there being many paths that don't go in the direction the graphcis imply. The gameplay is minimum, as the only real control you have is the direction your avatar moves. Fighting the main enemy of the game, the dragon, is often frustrating. And the graphical flickering is unbelievable at times.

By all means, everyone should play this. It earned its place in gaming history. But don't expect to have much fun beyond feeling like you took a time machine back to the late 70s.

This game sparked a true revolution, alongside Galaxian and Star Raiders which were all out the same year. It's a truly immersive quest which demands you pay attention to the world around you, and make the best of what you've got to find your way. The layout and the items used here are simple enough, but it's a miracle that you can still play this and not one of the adventure RPG elements here would seem awkward.

The only ill omen is that damn bat, which will always take your items and generally be a nightmare throughout the whole game. You'll likely spend 80% of the time just trying to get rid of him, but I'd say there's charm in doing that too.

Adventure is massively innovative for its day. And it's good! There's mazes to trek through, castles to discover and plunder for treasure in hopes of finding the chalice needed to finish the game, and dragons to slay. On the easier difficulty setting, this is quite simple once you know what you're doing, but the harder difficulty setting represents the full game, which is a more daunting task with more mazes, more keys, more castles, more dragons, and a bat that steals your stuff. While I think that Adventure on the harder difficulty setting is an impressively ambitious game for when the game came out, the bat kinda drags the game down because it's really tedious when you find something only for the bat to just drop it in some random location, so you go on a wild goose chase to find it. The bat moves really fast so it's very hard to stop the bat from snatching your stuff. I don't mind the bat doing this with the spear, but the bat stealing your keys makes this game more annoying than it should be, especially when this happens right before you're about to unlock a castle and thus no longer need to use the key. There's also the issue of itemswapping to carry multiple items from screen to screen, though this is more of a nag than a real flaw. It'd have been kind of hard to have an inventory menu with just one button, after all. But still, it feels like a big adventure, it's got a decently sized world, and it can be surprisingly exciting fighting a dragon in a maze area. Not to mention, it basically invented action/adventure games and featured one of the first easter eggs in a video game.

Adventure is surprisingly engaging and has a lot going for it in such a small game world with such a short overall quest. It’s divided into three difficulty levels, with the first functioning largely as a tutorial and the second being the core of the adventure. It’s pretty simple - you have to get three keys to unlock three castles to eventually reach the chalice and bring it back inside the yellow castle (the starting point). Throughout the map are three dragons however who you have to avoid or attack head-on with a sword, if you find it. The yellow dragon just wanders around, the green one guards the black key and other important items but will chase you just about everywhere, and the red one guards the chalice itself.

It’s a pretty simple setup, but the one factor that makes each session truly crazy is the bat who will trade any item it comes across, haphazardly dropping all of the key items (as well as the dragons themselves!) around the map after you’ve found them. It may sound annoying, and frankly it is, but it also adds a good deal of fun chaos into the otherwise simple adventure and forces to you think and rethink plans as you have to chase after the bat and find items constantly getting scattered across the map, especially since they stay in place after each reset. One time, the bat even picked up the dragon after it ate me (but before I reset) and flew all across the map, showing me where some key items were dropped before I hit the reset button to go get them. It makes the adventure much wilder than it appears at first and keeps you on alert at all times, even after you’ve gotten the chalice. The third difficulty level increases the chaotic elements further by randomizing the starting locations of all the dragons and the items, which can get pretty interesting, if a little unbalanced, once you’ve finished the main quest.

The game's a fun, fast-paced unmistakably Atari-like take on the adventure genre, keeping it distinct from the slower turn-based adventure titles on early PCs of the time like Temple of Apshai and Eamon, while also making it simple to play and really fun in short bursts. The action-adventure style of game this helped to pioneer has advanced significantly over time, but I still think this is fun to play in short one-off sessions if only to see just how ridiculous things get.

Very innovative game for the time, but it doesnt hold up so well today. You play as a square, which clearly ressembles a knight, and go around maze like levels grabbing keys to open up doors and using items to defeat snake like creatures, which clealy resemble dragons. Its a bit dull to play nowadays, but considering the sense of exploration it offers the players and the confusion of the maze like levels i would say it does stick out from the competition at the time.