Adventure Game Scene of the Day - Monday - Oct 30 2006
 

http://www.josephgoss.com/agshots/046.jpg

Not only did this game make me fall in love with adventure games when I was young, but the character's name in relation to even Monkey Island later was funny. What is great is that both of these games came from Lucasarts in 1990, one from Ron Gilbert and the other from Brian Moriarty. Bobbin's last name? Threadbare. Guybrush's last night? Threapwood. I wonder if they picked these out over dinner? :7

Loom is great. Very easy, and perhaps a bit of a gimmick, but it's done so well :).

Very good game.

This game really deserved to have the FM-TOWNS version released on CD in the West as opposed to the condensed Reader's Digest CD version with voice acting and missing music that we did get. Still, a great choice for a Scene of the Day.

I also think this is a great game, but I wouldn't want to pay more than MAX €10 for it. It's somewhat short...

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?

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.

Well i only ever played the old AMIGA versiona and it was fantastic, maybe if you've got an old AMIGA laying around :) hehe...

seriously though... i LOVED this game but i did play it AFTER monkey island so the Bobbin name dropping in Monkey island was lost on me until the 2nd time i played monkey.

kk, have fun.. hope you get to play it its such a fun game who cares if its easy and short you'll love how its played and the storyline.

GoT

Thanks ATMachine, that's exactly the kind of detail I was looking for. Seems like the EGA release is my best bet.