Loom - second opinion

I felt I must write a quick piece to reiterate Neil's opinion of
Loom. It really is one of the most beautiful games I have ever
seen, but it sure is easy! Even I completed it in three sittings
totalling 6 hours over two days and considering the RRP of the
game, that doesn't make it good value for money in my book. You
can see that an awful lot of work has gone into it - the graphic
artist deserves as much (if not more) recognition as the ones who
did Future Wars and gained so much acclaim - but œ5/hour for
entertainment is very steep. For that's what Loom is .... sheer,
brilliant entertainment with little puzzle content. Of the two
sticking points I had, only one was due to being held up at a
puzzle, the other was my inability to get Bobbin to go where I
wanted!

There's one point I'd like to make, though, on the hardware side,
which Neil wouldn't have experienced, having two double-sided
drives.  If you have one D/S and one S/S drive, you'll have to be
able to disable the S/S drive to play the game, whether the S/S
drive is your A or B drive.  My old STM has two external drives,
one D/S and 1 S/S, the D/S one being the A drive. I had to
disconnect the B drive to stop the game insisting that I use both
drives. That was no problem for me, but it's a disaster for anyone
with an ST with an internal S/S drive and an external D/S drive as
there is no way to disable the internal drive. Your only recourse
would be to change to single-sided disks and, personally, I
wouldn't envy you the disk-swapping which was bad enough on my
system.

On the plus side though, the concept of Loom is marvellous and
it's great to see Brian Moriarty bringing out another game,
especially one which is so different from anything else about. The
storyline is as good as his previous ones but it's the vibrant
colours of the graphics and the spot-animation of close-ups of the
characters in conversation or repose (just watch the sleeping
boy's ribs rise and fall as he breathes) which made the game so
memorable for me.

                                        Sue