Atari Adventure

Adventure is an Atari 2600 game developed by Warren Robinett. The game has you control a small dot that represents your character as you explore the nearby environments to find a magical chalice. While exploring you will need avoid roaming enemies that consist of a few dragons and a bat. Adventure is known for introducing new elements to console games, such as enemies that continued to move off screen freely, and a playing area spanning multiple screens.

Adventure is a very simple on both the visual and game-play fronts, mostly because of the time it was made, but both get the job done. The visuals are very minimal but work to let the player know what is happening. An example is the first room is yellow, has the dot the player moves, a key, and a structure that resembles a castle. This room helps show how the keys are colored similarly to the castles they unlock. So even though the visuals are simple they are designed in a way to help the player play through the game.

Game-play wise you simply explore the area to collect the chalice and that’s it. Sure, you have enemies in terms of the dragons and bat, but you don’t really initiate combat with them. The dragons dimply take one hit from the arrow looking item and are incapacitated while the bat simply comes takes any item then leaves. The difficulty comes more from the mazes in the game that you have to traverse, in some cases mazes that have no light so you have trouble navigating.

The game does suffer from a few glitches due to how old it is. While playing the game sometimes the items I grab will get stuck in the walls. Since they would be in the walls, I couldn’t grab them and would have to restart the game which is an inconvenience. Also, the bat enemy makes the game more tedious rather than add difficulty to the game in my opinion, and also can cause the game to do some wonky things. While playing a bat grabbed my weapon as I was getting in contact with the dragon causing the bat to pickup and drag the weapon, dragon and me, though I found this to be amusing I did have to restart because of it. Other than that the graphics would start flashing at random times, but this was only temporary and didn’t break the game.