I am a total sucker for this kind of old school games with Romantic-inspired (or, in this case, outright Romamtic) soundtracks and themes relating to fantasy and childhood.
They have a tendency to make me more teary-eyed than their content are supposed to make me.
It has happened with Loom, with its Tchaikovsky soundtrack and feelings of both wonder and loss playing quite a big role if you ask me.
Also, I was ready to defend the voice acting (cause to me it still feels charming)... But then I discovered that the talkie version has cut dialogue. My melancholy for the melancholic game has increased.
Oh no, I am going to disagree on your remarks about the EGA version so much. This is not nostalgia stuff - Lucasarts at that time had Mark Ferrari flexing his muscles and doing incredible work with the colours and the dithering in Monkey Island, Indiana Jones Crusade and this one, and the VGA version just added very very lazy dithering. There is a very comprehensive page about it in https://www.superrune.com/tutorials/loom_ega.php . This does not have to do with "playing ega on vga card" or "crt looked better" but just artistic merits, and the VGA was a quick cheap work with half of the effects that I consider way way less atmospheric.
There is a big difference with Sierra first SCI games where the dithering was done kind of afterwards (this is why scummvm does some magic transforming those games to several more colours than VGA). Ferrari worked really hard on there and images like the ones in Loom or in Monkey 1 (the Fetuccini brothers!) are just among the better graphics done at that time.
Yes, I actually saw and studied that page while writing the review, and I respect the points it makes - and obviously admire Mark Ferrari's work - but I still think that the retrospective perspective sells short the VGA remake. Loom's universe deserves to be a bit more colorful than the original was capable of, even if it ends up distorting the original vision (then again, even Moriarty acknowledges that the original vision itself was shaped by technical limitations, so it's very much of an egg-chicken problem).
In any case, it's a debatable situation (unlike with, say, the voice acting in the game, which I think is condemned quite universally).
I am a total sucker for this kind of old school games with Romantic-inspired (or, in this case, outright Romamtic) soundtracks and themes relating to fantasy and childhood.
They have a tendency to make me more teary-eyed than their content are supposed to make me.
It has happened with Loom, with its Tchaikovsky soundtrack and feelings of both wonder and loss playing quite a big role if you ask me.
Also, I was ready to defend the voice acting (cause to me it still feels charming)... But then I discovered that the talkie version has cut dialogue. My melancholy for the melancholic game has increased.
Oh no, I am going to disagree on your remarks about the EGA version so much. This is not nostalgia stuff - Lucasarts at that time had Mark Ferrari flexing his muscles and doing incredible work with the colours and the dithering in Monkey Island, Indiana Jones Crusade and this one, and the VGA version just added very very lazy dithering. There is a very comprehensive page about it in https://www.superrune.com/tutorials/loom_ega.php . This does not have to do with "playing ega on vga card" or "crt looked better" but just artistic merits, and the VGA was a quick cheap work with half of the effects that I consider way way less atmospheric.
There is a big difference with Sierra first SCI games where the dithering was done kind of afterwards (this is why scummvm does some magic transforming those games to several more colours than VGA). Ferrari worked really hard on there and images like the ones in Loom or in Monkey 1 (the Fetuccini brothers!) are just among the better graphics done at that time.
In my opinion :D
Yes, I actually saw and studied that page while writing the review, and I respect the points it makes - and obviously admire Mark Ferrari's work - but I still think that the retrospective perspective sells short the VGA remake. Loom's universe deserves to be a bit more colorful than the original was capable of, even if it ends up distorting the original vision (then again, even Moriarty acknowledges that the original vision itself was shaped by technical limitations, so it's very much of an egg-chicken problem).
In any case, it's a debatable situation (unlike with, say, the voice acting in the game, which I think is condemned quite universally).
Yeah, can get that. I just hate those deluxe paint gradients so much.