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Friday, October 1, 2010

Loom

Today I want to talk about a game I played when I was very little - Loom. It was released in 1990 (I was only 1 year of age back then. I have no clue when I started playing this, but I was a little kid who knew NO english. This is how I learned my first english words "use, save, load, item, etc") and it truly is one if it's kind.

You start as a wizard looking fellow in a grey robe on top of a mountain. You are summoned by the elders (it's your birthday too, yay) who shall determine your fate because you were educated without permission or something. The one who educated you is turned into an ugly duckling, if memory serves me right, but right afterwards, a swan comes and turns all the weavers (except you. You are also a weaver btw) into swans who then proceeds to fly away.
The dude who got punished for educating you, tells you that the swan who visits you every year of your birthday came to save the Weavers from the Third Shadow that is about to cover the world.


When all this drama is over, the village is deserted and you start your adventure.
You have a wooden staff that you use to cast spells. Spells are cast in a unique way in this game. You have 6 nodes iirc(If I remember correctly) that play tones "a, b, c, d, e, f, g', C". When you play them in the right order, you perform a spell.
Example: When you leave the village in a boat you are stopped by a water tornado. In the village you saw a thing spin around (can't really remember what it was) and if you clicked that, it played 4 nodes. When you get to the tornado, you are supposed to play those 4 nodes backwards to dissolve the tornado. This being a very old game you had to remember everything yourself (write spells down and such). The spells also changed every time you made a new game so you couldn't "cheat" that way.

The story in the game was astonishing, nothing like today's video games.You proceed to different places in the game and end up in some green tower where there is a devil, (he looked awesome even though the graphics were old xD) he's probably the Third Shadow. He rips the universe in pieces in some way and you end up falling down in that rift.
When you enter that rift there are holes everywhere to all the places you've "completed". When you enter a hole there is a ghost of someone who died because of you (you didn't know this until now) and they block the hole so you can't get back before you fixed what your did.
When you close all the holes you get to a pond with swans in them where you find the Weavers from your town and you also find your mother, the swan who visits you each year.
This whole part is incredible. The graphics and the story, unlike ANYTHING you could ever imagine back then.

You get back to the village with the big loom (oh yeah, there was a gigantic loom in the village. Maybe I should have mentioned that earlier) where you face the Third Shadow. Some awesome showdown happens and weird things happen, can't really remember them that well.

That was probably the first computer game I ever completed (I don't know if it was before Quake and Doom..) and the journey through it was simply amazing. The history itself was mind blowing.

Did any of you readers play this game? In case I have awoken some nostalgia in you, here's a more accurate read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loom_%28video_game%29

19 comments:

  1. you need to try this game.

    http://www.addictinggames.com/topsy-turvy-game.html

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  2. ah i've been thinking about this game but couldn't recall its name! thanks!

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  3. sounds notning like anything i've played. i feel sore that i never owned a snes or anything like it.

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  4. Heard good things about Loom, but never played it. Was a bit before my time, or at least before i got my first PC.

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  5. hahah my uncle used to have this game, i think this was the game that scared the crap out of me when i was younger

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  6. NEver played it, sounds fun though lol

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  7. I don't recall ever playing that but still remember going over a friends house and playing wolfenstein 3d on his computer (back when a basic computer was like 4000)

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  8. sounds like exactly something I would have loved to play

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  9. Hmm... The notes playing remind me of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for N64, when you had to push the C buttons to play songs.

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  10. What language did you speak as a kid? Mexican?

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  11. Sounds familiar. Maybe I have, that was a long time ago.

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  12. Oh yeah I played Zelda too, but only Majoras Mask. That game is totally awesome as well :D

    HiveNode - Danish :P

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  13. Heard about this,i wanted to play it

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  14. for me the best games were on snes and psx

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  15. this sounds like an amazing game. I wish more of them utilized the sound/spell system.

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  16. For some reason I keep thinking I may have tried this game. Then at other times I can't really tell. If not still sounds like something I'd want to play lol

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  17. have u found some more games like this one?

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