Loom

One of my favourite games of all time as a child was the magical adventure game, Loom. The first time I played it, I didn't really understand the story, yet still loved it, and playing it over and over again after my brain had developed more and therefore capable of comprehending more, I've understood the story, more and more each time I've played.

I just played it again, but a different version. A more updated version, I imagine, considering the improvement on the sound effects and the speech included, (when I played it was just text,) but I also found this version disappointing compared to my memory of the original version.

For one thing, the voice acting wasn't that great and I preferred the voices I attributed to the characters when it was still in my head, but despite that, it was other things, too.

The gameplay and the puzzles and the spells were pretty much the same, but it was the little things that seemed to lack the sophistication of the orignal. With one exception at the very end, it didn't have the close-ups of people talking at certain times, which showed much more detail of the characters and their expressions even with the limited graphic capability of the time. This is lack most noticable in the scene when the dragon comes to eat the blacksmith boy, the dragon thinking it's Bobbin. It has the closeup of the dragon scratching the blacksmith boy's head, and I remember the pixel artwork to be quite haunting and beautiful. In this version, it just had the dragon flying back and forth, which didn't quite fit in with the dialogue at the time.

And then we get to the dialogue. The dialogue has been changed. Simpler, I imagine, to make it easier for the player to follow the story. It's also not as good, and leaves out important concepts that I remember enjoying when playing the original version.

For example, it doesn't have the little piece of story line of the Bishop learning the spell, the final piece to his plan, on how to tear open the pattern of the universe by locking Bobbin in the cage and listening to the spell Bobbin used to open the cage. It mentions how the Bishop already knew that Bobbin was capable of opening the cage quite easily with the spell, so why did he lock him in there in the first place? In the original version it's hinted that it's part of the Bishop's brilliant plan to learn the spell that will help him rule the world (so he thinks), but in this more recent version, it's not mentioned at all.

There's also the matter of Cob making the deal with Bobbin and Bobbin's reflection. When Bobbin notices his reflection in the pond in the dragon's cage, he's disgusted with it. But in this version, he just notes that he notices his reflection. The disgust in the original game ties into later, when Cob makes a deal with Bobbin to see what's under his hood. There's a rumour that to peek underneath a weaver's hood is to bring hood. In the original, we don't see what happens to Cob, it just goes black and we hear Cob's blood-curtling scream, indicating that whatever's under there is so horrific that it caused him to go mad and jump off the tower. At least that's what I thought. In this version, we see what happens. He looks under Bobbin's hood, and then disppears in some blue light.

Not nearly as horrifying as I imagined.

One last thing, and this is more of a mistake which they didn't have in the original version. There's the scene where Bobbin's in the blacksmith's guild. There's the blacksmith forging the sword. In both versions, you're supposed to use the twist spell to twist the blade of the sword in order to advance to the next scene. However, if you used the reverse of the sharpen spell to blunt the sword, the blacksmith takes note of witchcraft but it doesn't make you go into the next scene.

Well, I used the blunt spell on the sword, and the blacksmith notes how the blade's been twisted horribly.

It's still a great game, don't get me wrong, a brilliant game. But compared to the original version... I just couldn't find the magic that I found in the original version.