Adventure
by Eric March on November 17, 2008 at 12:30 pm
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(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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App Name: Adventure
Version: 1.0
Developer: Peter Hirschberg
Category: RPG & Adventure Games
No way!
I saw this in the App Store last night and that was the first thing I thought. Could it be? Dare I hope? It … it … it is! It’s Warren Robinett’s perennial classic Adventure from the Atari 2600 brought back to life in exacting detail on the iPhone! Outstanding!
Pardon me if I’m giddy, but if I can’t have a real Atari 2600 emulator, or even some sort of emulated package deal like Activision Classics, then by Og’s undulating neck wattle, I’m going to take what I can get, and at the moment, I can get Adventure.
Now, I am always leery of remakes and ports, because it is almost always the case that programmers rarely make them as well or as accurately as the originals. But this is Peter Hirschberg. He’s already done a highly faithful conversion of Adventure for Windows and MacOS, which also includes extra play modes and mazes not found in the original, though, so this had to be good.
In playing, I was pleased to find that, in fact, it was almost perfect. The graphics were identical. The sound was taken straight from the original. Even the gameplay was the same. Most excellent indeed. Of course, I said almost perfect. The major difference here is the control scheme, which is done with the accelerometer here, and it just feels wrong. Aside from the fact that the dead zone is fairly small, making movement a little twitchy due to continually trying to find the neutral position, this is and should always be a joystick game — and in the absense of a joystick, a D-Pad, virtual or otherwise. I know there’s no single elegant solution for implementing a D-Pad on a 100% touchscreen device, but dangit, it needs one. I propose a 75% transparent D-Pad on the left and the whole right half of the screen can be tapped for the fire button. Or use a tap-and-drag system like Hudson’s Bomberman on the iPhone/Touch. I could work with either.
This iPhone/Touch version does feature all teh same settings as the original (which were originally set via the console’s difficulty switches), such as the ability to toggle standard or slower dragon attacks, whether or not the dragons run from the sword, plus bonus features such as the ability to enable rumble or set the tilt base to play at the angle you want. There are on-board instructions that are basically an exact copy of the original game manual.
Overall, control issues aside, this is a blast from the past and I’m unnaturally happy to see this appear on the iPhone. So happy that I’m going to award Peter 5 well-deserved stars and a MAN-EATING DUCK!
Pointless Trivia: Adventure was the first game ever to feature an Easter egg — a hidden surprise within a game that can only be unlocked or displayed through a series of actions, be they in-game actions, joystick movements, or keystrokes. If you perform a certain sequence of moves in Adventure, you can find Warren’s credit at a specific location in the game. Warren was inspired to do this because at the time, the policy at Atari was not to give its individual programmers credit for the games they designed, so Warren snuck his own credit in there his way. That same anonymity policy would quickly cause a mini-exodus of employees to leave and start up their own game companies like Imagic and Activision.
Peter’s conversion of Adventure does, in fact, contain the easter egg just like the original. (See the Wikipedia article linked above.)
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