Game Details
Venture is a fantasy-themed action game released in arcades in 1981 by Exidy. The goal of Venture is to collect treasure from a dungeon as a round smiley-face named Winky. It was released as a launch title for the ColecoVision in 1982 and then ported to the Atari 2600 and Intellivision.
Winky is equipped with a bow and arrow and explores a dungeon with rooms and hallways. The hallways are patrolled by large, tentacled monsters named Hallmonsters, which cannot be killed, injured, or stopped in any way. Once in a room, Winky may kill monsters, avoid traps and gather treasures. If he stays in any room too long, a Hallmonster will enter the room, chase and kill him. In this way, the Hallmonsters serve the same role as "Evil Otto" in the arcade game Berzerk. The more quickly the player finishes each level, the higher their score.
The goal of each room is only to steal the room's treasure. In most rooms, it is possible (though difficult) to steal the treasure without defeating the monsters within. Some rooms have traps that are only sprung when the player picks up the treasure. For instance, in "The Two-Headed Room", two 2-headed ettins appear the moment the player picks up the prize.
Winky dies if he touches a monster or Hallmonster. Dead monsters decay over time and their corpses may block room exits, delaying Winky and possibly allowing the Hallmonster to enter. Shooting a corpse causes it to regress back to its initial death phase. The monsters themselves move in specific patterns but may deviate to chase the player, and the game's AI allows them to dodge the player's shots with varying degrees of "intelligence" (for example, the snakes of "The Serpent Room" are relatively slow to dodge arrows, the trolls of "The Troll Room" are quite adept at evasion).
The game consists of three different dungeon levels with different rooms. After clearing all the rooms in a level the player advances to the next. After three levels the room pattern and monsters repeat, but at a higher speed and with a different set of treasures.
The different dungeons in each level are as follows:
- Wall Room, Serpent Room, Skeleton Room, Goblin Room
- Two-Headed Room, Dragon Room, Spider Room, Troll Room
- Genie Room, Demon Room, Cyclops Room, Bat Room
Effort in TASing
I had no intention of TASing this game, but feos asked me to look at it, after Winslinator submitted it almost 2 years ago. I did discover some optimization issues, but they were hard to hold on to, as future rooms would eat up the gains that I found. Because I had done the Colecovision version, I finally got interested and quickly found that this version was just as hard, with a few differences.
Instead of 10 months on the Coleco version, I spent 2 years looking that this game (on and off). I would periodically try, only to stop after running into issues. Just recently, I decided to buckle down and figure this mess out. Now that I understand what is going on, I was finally able to cut 167 frames over the previous version.
Additionally, there was BOTing performed on specific segments to find out if the inputs could be played with during door transitions. Well, on rare occasions...something would come up, but it wasn't really advantageous...as any time cut would changes things downstream.
Strategies
- Shooting enemies causes lag. On most cases, the results in 2 frames of lag. On rare occasions, you can get 1 frame.
- RNG is controlled by movement. Unlike the Colecovision version, RNG doesn't have a lower percentage of being manipulated in the end. As for AI, the further you progress...the more the enemies directly home in on you.
- Changing direction in this game does not cause delays. With the Colecovision, this was a huge problem and had to be worked around to push optimization.
- Routing can make the best difference. Moving across a "Level Area" is faster, than inside a room. For instance, the 3rd visited room of Level 1 can be entered from the left or right side; however, it takes more time to go from the left side to the right side of the room, if you have entered from the left.
Winslinator
First off, I want to thank Winslinator for his work on the previous version. I respect the work that he did on this, as it was very tough to beat; however, I don't wish to convey any disrespect...but this TAS was built from the ground up, to create a brand new movie for accomplishing this new evel of optimization.
Human Comparison
This runner plays the game on the easiest level, but demonstrates the human capabilities quite nicely.
eien86: Claiming for judging.
eien86: In this movie, Nymx, with a little help from Winslinator, improves on the previous movie ([4873] INTV Venture "all treasures" by Winslinator in 05:45.71) by almost three seconds. The movie completes all 9 distinct levels (after which the game apparently simply repeats) with celerity, stealing all treasures in a kleptomaniac frenzy. The movie is sufficiently optimized, even using botting to optimize certain parts.
Accepting to standard
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