Reviews

Playing this on a real Spectrum without the use of save states can be very frustrating due to the fatal pitfalls. Combine these with less than perfect controls and you have a game that shouldn't be fun at all, but somehow still is. I love the graphical style and the game has a charm to it that I can't really explain.

It has the familiar Shaw Brothers look, on first impression this looks a bit like Cavemania, a Shaw Brothers game I reviewed some years ago. However the gameplay doesn't match up to a typical Shaw Brothers game. The movement of your character is slow and jerky, unlike a Shaw Brothers game which were usually smooth, and the jumping doesn't quite work too well as well as controls that don't respond very well. This looks like this could have been quite a nice game and I'm really disappointed that it's not. I'm going to put this down as a prototype that was prone to faults and inconsistencies, a prototype that was eventually never released that is, and I begin to see why.

Not sure if it's a magazine game but this venturama looks like the love child of Myth: History in the Making and Jack the Nipper 2

1992 Your Sinclair (UK)
by Graham D. Shaw

Done for Your Sinclair magazine and renamed after an earlier version by the author called The Adventurer, this game features beautiful backgrounds and quite nice overall graphics, the only big letdown is how rough it plays. The action is straightforward enough, without much complications, and it plays like any platform game, catching stuff and avoiding nasties.
Overall it's just plain average and I don't think the author intended for much, taking into account is extensive softography.