Loom is a Lucas Arts production from the early 90s. At the time, the company was already famous for its tricky adventure games. This is why the fan base was happy when another game was released in 1990, but they were quickly disappointed.

Loom, an adventure in which Bobbin Threadbare, the last weaver, explores the secret of the magical yarn, was an extreme alienation from the classical adventure genre. There is no inventory, no action verbs and no interactive dialogue. The only method of control is to manipulate items and people via magical songs. Additionally, the game is very short (it is possible to beat it in three hours). Originally the first part of a planned trilogy, it remained a curiosity of which even Lucas Arts itself started making fun of.

There are several versions of the game. The original 16-color version was released identically on PC, Amiga and Atari ST. A few months later there was a 256-color version for PC on CD and on the Japanese FM-Towns home computer.

There is already a comparison describing the differences and the censorship of the CD-version. However, this report here is about the censorship (and one missing part) that appears on both the FM-Towns- and PC-CD-version, which are based on the same enhanced version of the game. Because of the fact that the CD version misses a lot of other stuff (see the other comparison) we had to use the FM-Towns-version in order to show you just the one part that is missing in this version compared to the EGA version. If we would have taken the CD-Version to compare it with the EGA-Version we would had to list every other difference that has already been described in the other comparison too.

Although the FM-Towns-version is slightly censored too, still it is the best version of the game and highly the one to prefer. It is playable on ScummVM. The EGA-version is completely uncensored but just looks terrible and also doesn't have music all the time.

The PC-EGA-version has been compared to the FM-Towns-version.

PC-EGA Version	FM-Towns Version

Bloodcensoring


There are dead and wounded people as Bobbin looks for the guilds who were attacked by the undead relatively late in the game. At the glass-blowers guild, Bobbin finds dying Goodmold and his head is lying in a pool of blood. The difference here is that both his sprite and the display in the object-line show his head in a blood pool, while the VGA-versions had this pool of blood under the sprite removed. (In the PC-CD-version, the blood is also missing in the object line)

PC-EGA-version	FM-Towns-version

It should be noted that this censoring is entirely pointless. All the other bloody scenes in the game (especially Bishop Mandible's death!) were left untouched. Why it was just this one stain of blood that had caught Lucas Arts' attention will probably forever remain a mystery.

Missing overture

The VGA-versions don't have the overture from the EGA-version that is played in the beginning of the game. This overture is about two minutes long and is heard nowhere else in the game.

This may be a mistake, because the original version had a bug that made the overture skip until a patch fixed this (and improved the music at that). It is possible that this was forgotten and the existence of the overture was not known.