Well, since there’s not much point in playing Star Wars Galaxies until the NGE is applied, I’ve been kinda searching for something new to play at night. I didn’t really feel like replaying any of my FPS’s, so I thought I’ld venture out into the free Open Source game arena.

A while back I tried go (blog entry here) and had alot of fun with it. One thing I tried without much success was an old Lucasarts game called Loom. It was originally written for the old Amiga back in 1991, but the version I had was from a rerelease of it on CD, with VGA graphics and CD Audio for voice. It was an amazing & innovative game, but I never finished it. When I tried it with ScummVM, I couldn’t get it to work quite right. Specifically, I couldn’t get the sound to work right, and the game just wasn’t as fun without the voice.. And trying to get the voice to work kept resulting in lags in the game. Since the game was originally written for 1x-2x CDRoms, my CD kept spinning up to full-speed, then back down to idle.. and the delay kept stalling the game as it would try to fast-forward to specific portions of the audio track, and finally get it wrong.

Well, I decided I would give it another try last night. Specifically, I found out that you can rip the CD audio tracks for a game like that as MP3′s and place them in the directory, and it’ll use the MP3′s instead of the CD Audio! Given that the Voice Addon Patch actually decodes an MP3 to create the audio track, it was a perfect match!

So I spent some time last night playing it, and was simply amazed at how great the game is. With some of ScummVM’s new graphics filters I could resample the original 320×200 graphics through their “hq3x” filter to get nice high-rez graphics. But it’s amazing that a game 10+ years old is still this much fun, and that Lucasarts doesn’t sell it anymore. It’s a great flashback to a time when Story & Simplicity was more important than Wiz-Bang graphics and physics engines. The voice acting is better than anything I’ve heard in the last few years from the mainstream companies, and the graphics are more “artistic” than anything you’ll find in the latest games flying off the shelves. Granted they’re not “photorealistic”, but who cares? The storyline is great, and innovative. None of this “Save the world”, rather it’s “Get out of the world!”

Definately a game I recommend trying out. Coming across a copy is pretty difficult, but copies pop up on Ebay regularly. You can probably find the old floppy-disk version on an abandonware site somewhere, and then apply the VGA-Graphics patch & Voice Patch (Both hosted on Home of the Underdogs), and essentially have the CD Version. Besides, it’s good for all us to get back to our gaming roots every now and then.

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