Looming weavers of Amiga

30 years of computing cooperating on my desk.

Back in 1990's, Lucasfilm (LucasArts) and Sierra adventure games were some of my favourite games of them all - especially the ones from late 1980's and early 1990's. In fact I'd even daresay those made the basis of my good English skills as a kid, and that was also one reason I liked them. There were few of their games from the era though that I never managed to obtain myself to play.

Loom by Lucasfilm Games had been until now probably my most significant loss, and only now I also understood the name correctly. As a kid I thought Loom would be just a name - maybe some entity in the game or a character. Then I assumed it'd been about verb to loom - and this was supported by screenshots of the game that seemed to have kind of looming atmosphere there. I suppose it might still be a pun and have this intended looming in the background, but as a direct reference the name Loom refers to a loom in the game. And the protagonist is not a wizard or cultist despite his looks with hooded cape and staff but a weaver from the Guild of Weavers. Weavers with loom, I see, makes sense.

So in any case, since I have had my dear Amiga 500 set up recently and I happened to have Amiga Loom available, I finally decided to give it a shot. In my youth I was somewhat concerned about the gameplay of Loom (I knew about it through reviews), since it was experimental and lacked the traditional verbs as commands. This was few years before icons or mere mouseclicks become commonplace, and I certainly did not complain that Lucas still released few more traditional verb based games in 1990's. In Loom instead the player would simply point and click and occasionally use 4-note tune patterns as spells to interact with the objects.

For what I know, Loom was never quite as successful as many other Lucas adventures, despite it being referred to in many subsequent Lucas adventures. For the genre options from the era it surely is worth playing, however, it is more of a snack than a full meal like most other titles better remembered. A bit like Full Throttle several years later I suppose.

That is, I find Loom fairly easy and short - even by modern standards; I spent few hours with it on my first try to get it completed, and only in two occasions I had to stop for a moment not knowing what should I do. The first one was quite much in the beginning and I had not yet realized that the patterns would be usable in the opposite order: so if ECED would be opening, DECE would be closing. The second case came when I did not notice that there was a place to click in one screen.

This is saying that the game is pretty straight-forward, and part of the easiness comes with the interface: there are not close as many objects in the landscape one can interact with as with most other Lucas games I'd played. The few items you'll simply pick by double clicking, which also is true with talking and other things you can do - and usually there is only one to three things on each room to interact with for only one purpose, in addition to exits and entrances.

Usually the interaction is done by casting a musical pattern or spell which have quite obvious effects in less than difficult to figure situations such as healing an injured or waking up a sleeper. In most cases the game puzzles are just to find which spell to cast where and from where to get the spell and skill to cast it. At least no hassle with items! Generally if there is a spell that might seem logical to cast, it will progress the plot on tracks. There are couple a slightly more twisted puzzles with stairs and dragon, but since in most cases there are all the time only so many rooms you can access, objects to interact and patterns you can weave, it won't take long to even just iterate "try everything everywhere" kind of activity. Also can not die or fail by any action - except by not taking a record of a pattern heard before - there is often no returning to old zones.

On the other hand the narration is quite alright and game-wise not all that standard and stereotypic, where there simply is a great evil fellow that needs to be defeated in order to save the world. I guess there are things similar here too, but that is far from being the actual plot or anything like that. On a yet another hand, the fantasy setting and storytelling gives some very possibly unexpected twists and even fun transitions, but actually in many cases I think they go a bit too fast and a bit too much of Deus Ex Machina style. I mean that there is fairly much of moon logic at least in the events - you'll just do what you can, and that makes you getting dragged to something completely else without looking back really. In addition to gameplay differences it would have felt like more depth also in the storyworld if I would have needed to walk away from the region by my own decision because I think I've seen everything - now it's largely that if it's just possible to move on, there is nothing that could have done before.

The game is also not necessarily very consistent with style of content. I mean that despite looming dark atmosphere in the beginning, the spirit (music included) is rather kid-friendly and maybe partially even too juvenile fairy-tale like. Yet later in the game there are almost horror themes and even violence that might not be fully approrpiate for the youngest of the family, and that was a bit of a surprise (and amusement) to me. Although actually many old games are "inconsistent" with style, and in adventure games especially you can just encounter anything whenever whereever.

As I was earlier speaking of time spent for walkthrough, I reckon I'd spent at least one third less time had I played the game on PC. Testing wrong patterns on Amiga takes a while, since tunes are played with a very peaceful pace on standard Amiga 500 (RAM expansion doesn't matter). Overall much of the animation especially when there are few more things on the screen is quite time consuming from modern impatient point of view. In fact I do remember also back in the time how it was frustrating as in many games there were several scenes where the player just needed to wait till the character walked across the screen without anything to do. Loom even has the "era mandatory" maze, even while at least that is fortunately almost as straight-forward as most of the game.

Speaking of slowness, of course there there are some disk swappings too, but they are not too bad on Gotek floppy emulator where swapping a disk is just a click. It's a bit annoying when needs to do two or even more disk swappings when changing a scene though. Also has to wait for some loadings - I can live with that, and emulated loading sounds have some spirit in them, yet I wouldn't mind having a disk turbo on Amiga should one not hamper with compatibility.

Nevertheless, what is more of a problem is that needs to be quite careful with swapping the disk images on floppy emulator. There is unfortunately no way to write protect the floppy images, and swapping them too abruptly can cause the disk image to get corrupted. This is especially due the way Amiga loads and pauses a bit every time a disk is inserted, and as with Gotek the disk swapping is easy enough it can even be done by accident. So in the end I managed to corrupt my game disks and worst of all my save disk twice - first in the very beginning of testing if I can save in the first place and second time after I had already completed the game. The second time the save disk did not get spoiled completely though, so I didn't lose the saves. The risk for lost records is real with the system here. Always have a backup of your disk images elsewhere but your USB stick when dealing with Gotek, and consider backing up the save images occasionally as well!

Fantastic loom of the game is there.

Those things leads to one sad thing: rationally there are not so many reasons to play quite a few Amiga games, if you just can select any version available. Especially as for most people nowadays Amiga (even emulated) is not the platform most likely available. There are lots of games that are only for Amiga or where the Amiga version is the best version. Unfortunately the latter applies mostly to games from late 1980's, when Amiga was the super home computer in the Europe, while the former applies mostly to games that are not of my favourite genres - various action based stuff.

Playing with Amiga is not a rational but emotional choice, however. I do have lots of nostalgic feelings with this device, as it's the first computer I have really in my life. Still there is also something weirdly fascinating in Amiga and its software. It just doesn't feel like any other computer, apart of course its rival Atari ST, and therefore even titles familiar from other platforms might feel like curious experiences at least in small batches. Not to mention demos... This stuff would already call for their own article, so I'll better get back to having more of some good Amiga time.