World's Greatest Classic
Books, Corel (Windows)
£19.95
THIS CD Rom is proof - if proof were needed - of how cheap it is to distribute text on the little silver disks. For the price of three average paperbacks it contains the text of over 3,500 works, ranging from Shakespeare to Poe, and from Hippocrates to the Bible, Book of Mormon and Koran.
There are some multimedia elements, but they are thin on the ground. The main attraction is the sheer volume of texts. You won't find your Maeve Binchy or Elmore Leonard favourites here, since the economics of this sort of publishing restricts it to authors who are long enough dead for their works to have passed out of copyright. There is a search engine to find favourite quotations or authors, but it can be cumbersome and sometimes slow.
Finally, there is also proof - if it were needed - that reading on screen is much less comfortable than reading on paper. Even with these reservations, it is still impressive to have such a huge library in your pocket.
The Great Green Mouse Disaster, PixelMagic, Ages 5-11 (Windows, Mac)
£29.99
ONE irony of the computer age is that old fashioned, hand drawn animation is making a comeback on CD Roms. For example, this morning sees the launch of three "interactive storybooks" by TerraGlyph, a Chicago based firm which employs some 35 animators in its Dublin studio. Most of them are battle scarred veterans of the animation industry here, and have worked on such titles as An American Tail and Thumbelina.
Dublin company PixelMagic has also gone back to the (traditional) drawing board for The Great Green Mouse Disaster, which is aimed at children aged five to 11. A mouse orchestra is due to play in a sleepy hotel, but the cuddly rodents escape when a dozy porter drops their basket. Using a mouse detector, you have to find out which room each one is hiding in, then click on the furniture and other objects to locate it, nab it by the tail and add it to the orchestra (and learn a little bit about musical instruments at the same time).
The payoff each time is a slap stick disaster, and these animation sequences will even enchant adults. Admittedly, there's a limited range of scenarios, so the playability factor began to slump the third or fourth time around - particularly among two 10 year olds in our guinea pig group. Even so, it's a fine illustration of how to mix traditional cartoon craft with modern software authoring packages - in this case, mainly Macromedia Director - and create an entertaining self contained world.
It's also great to see a small Dublin company's titles being selected by Macmillan's rapidly expanding digital publishing division. The game is directly available from Macmillan Interactive Publishing at 0044-1 256-302- 683.
Pandora's Box, Corel CO
Home, Ages 6-12 (Windows,
Mac
THIS CD-Rom storybook version of the venerable Greek legend comes complete with animations, sounds and special fun activities joining the dots, colouring moving pictures and singing along to the soundtrack in Christmas panto style. Aoife (12) and Niamh (8) tried it out.
Aoife liked the colourful pictures and creative animations in, the (only) 10 pages of the story. Niamh enjoyed colouring the moving drawings; "you can change the colours as often as you like".
The songs, though, are unacceptably twee (or "thick" as Niamh put it), and there is a Disneyesque complacency about Pandora, even after she foolishly opens the box and unleashes the dreaded Miseries. The poor girl can be forgiven, however, for her introduction to this world of mortals is her suitor Epimetheus very mortal line: "Pandora, we must get to know each other better."
The other horrors, those which emerge from the box, act more like Caspar the Friendly Ghost than terrible furies; the story cries out for a Terry Gilliam inspired graphics programmer to devise some imaginative anarchic creations. Some really scary sounds would have helped also.
Aoife criticised the lack of interaction (contrast Iona Software's excellent Imagination Express where children devise their own stories) and Niamh found a second reading of the narrative "boring". We all agreed that Pandora's Box, despite the CD ROM paraphernalia, appeals, like Ladybird books, mainly to the very young.
CO Office Companion (Corel, Windows)
WHAT do you give the office PC that has everything? Well how about a CD Rom with 10 utilities that fill in the gaps between the standard office suite of word processor, spreadsheet, database and presentation program? (The user may not have noticed the gaps, but that's another matter.)
Among the most useful programs are CorelFlow 2 business graphics and Corel Gallery 2 with 15,000 clipart images, 500 TrueType fonts, 200 photos and 75 sound clips. There is also a Web browser, a fax program and an electronic diary and planner, system diagnostics, an audio CD player and some screen savers. Not to mention 700 form letters and a reference system with dictionary, encyclopaedia and sports and business almanacs.
The reference shelf is no Encarta, but it has useful basic information, without the multimedia trimmings. CorelFlow 2 is a full featured tool for creating building layouts, flow charts or network diagrams, with hundreds of supplied symbols and "smart links" which keep connecting lines when one element is moved. None of these programs is the last word in its own area, hut taken together they offer quite a range of features.