Quote:
Originally Posted by Junkface
The thing that's always kept me from acquiring and playing this game is the amount of different versions of it, each with differing advantages. There doesn't seem to be a particular definitive release of it. Which would you people recommend for a first playthrough?
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Personally I'd recommend starting with the original EGA PC version and working up from there. In plain terms, it's much closer to Brian Moriarty's vision for the game than the PC CD release is.
The original 16-color version has really detailed dialogue which does a lot in setting up the atmosphere of the game. Plus it has lots of long music tracks, which IMHO are also critical in creating the "feel" Loom is meant to have.
(Of course if you can find the FM TOWNS version, which is basically the EGA version with VGA graphics and full-length CD music tracks instead of MIDI, more power to you. But it's much easier to find the original EGA release.)
The CD version has pretty VGA graphics (a bit better than the FM TOWNS ones, I'll admit) and very talented voice acting with an all-British cast. But the price is that the dialogue is horribly cut and compressed (rewritten by Orson Scott Card, mind you, not Moriarty), large chunks of cutscenes (including a bunch of close-up character portraits) are cut out, and the music (which is so central to the game's atmosphere) is almost nonexistent.
In short, the PC CD is really a greatly inferior watered-down copy of the original game experience.
