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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

Loom was the first quest game I ever played, and it still is a marvel. replayed it a couple of years ago and was really surprised how well it ages - way better than Monkey Island, I must say.

This comparison is a very good reminder that severe limitations sometimes produce greater results. EGA version looks so much better than smoothly colored VGA.

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How appropriate. You weave like a duck!

Okay, I'm asking you about Monkey Island: Why do you think it did not age that well?

The interface. All that grid of available actions, just too many options. Later quests evolved to have fewer actions (see Full Throttle), and later the only option left was general 'interact' action.

In this regard Loom was already ahead, with all actions replaced by general 'cast' action, and the exact combination of notes was the puzzle.

Reminds me of the sarcastic lick and smell actions they added to Space Quest when they were pressured to move away from the old text based input system.

They were the most memorable features of the game they were in.

Funnily enough Monkey Island was already redeuced actions, Maniac Mansion and Zak Mckracken had even more.

It is easy to understand, why. Graphical adventure games were direct successors of text adventure games, where players interacted with the world via text commands, and you could have dozens of them without cluttering the interface.

I've heard Bethesda is working feverishly to remove all options from their games and just leave an "interact" button.

Your dream will come true in Elder Scrolls VI i guess.

It's not my dream per se, but in Monkey Island 1&2, when stuck and without an internet walkthrough, it was extremely frustrating to try out all the actions on all the objects. Full Throttle and Grim Fandango improved on that old model immensely, and Loom's interface turned out to be 10 years ahead of the curve.

You do remember you had to write down the songs right?

I think that type of thing can really enhance a game if done right. It engages more of your senses and gets you (literally) thinking outside the box. It makes you feel like you're learning and demonstrating a skill, but in actuality the skill is just being attentive. The original came with a booklet [1] where you could write down the spells next to explanations of what they did, seems like an excellent way to do it.

[1] https://youtu.be/WFl7Q1Io51c?t=370

Btw when I played it for the first time I just didn't understand that the pattern played backwards did the opposite. I thought that those are different spells, and it made things so much harder. Only many years later when I came back to replay Loom I noticed that some patters are suspiciously similar... oh boy.

Been probably 30 years since I played it last, but that would so make sense wouldn't it. I don't think I figured that out back then, wow. Still, the interface compared to all the other adventure games at that time was just so different and full of wonder, I kept coming back until I finished the darn game.

Yeah, the hip bone connected to the arm bone. This song is etched in my mind forever.

For the dancing skeletons?

I loved Loom but looking at what Wikipedia says were release platforms, I'm going to have to dig out the box because I didn't have one of those. It is one of the only old video games that I still have the box because it was so fun.

I'm a big fan too.

Oh, pleasure to meet you, Transultimate Apostle!

Is there a way to legally play the EGA version these days?

Once again the Internet Archive comes to the rescue https://archive.org/details/msdos_Loom_1990

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