Both versions are the VGA versions of the game. I've run both in DOSBox and on the PC and added the -V when launching the game to force VGA mode (not that it needed it). I've also tried them in EGA mode (both on the 386 and in DOSBox) to see if that would throw up colour errors that I can compare between the two (it didn't) and it looks completely different, obviously. I am not that dumb!

No, the EGA/VGA difference is certainly not the case here!
The game on the first picture is the VGA version, but some broken kind of it probably.
The EGA version looks quite different:
download/file.php?mode=view&id=81826