You have to wonder. A comic book like Prime costs about US$1.50, is portable, disposable, and requires no special talents or equipment to read. Put it on CD-ROM, and you now have something that costs 20 times as much and can only be read when you're sitting in front of $2,500 worth of hardware. Is there a compelling reason for directly translating a comic book into this new medium? With the exception of one vivid and thrilling sound effect of the hero vomiting, the answer is No, no, no.
This is a beautiful program, with a keen visual style and well-chosen music. With some discipline and care, it could have been a first-rate piece of edutainment. Unfortunately, it serves as a vivid example of how not to do multimedia. Click on a button called Leonardo's Words, and you'll see what's wrong with this program in a nutshell. A box will appear containing a dense quote from Leonardo da Vinci - a series of observations on the structural similarities of moving water and moving hair, for instance. This is great stuff, if hard to digest; remember, Leonardo was a genius. Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to keep the window open long enough to listen to the voice - sounding alarmingly similar to Father Guido Sarducci's - that recites the quote; before you've had a chance to figure out what Leonardo might have meant, the window snaps shut.
This is a self-defense-for-women video that has, unaccountably, been transferred to CD-ROM. It has an amazing amount of footage of seedy guys menacing women, in episodes with titles like "The Date Rape" and "The Stairwell." The women, with their eye-pokes and throat-punches and wrist-twists, evade the bad guys over and over again. For the most part, using this program provides almost exactly the same experience as viewing the videotape that comes with it. Why it's on CD-ROM is a mystery.
This is the perfect gift for...well, for the people whose computer use is cutting into their TV watching. It includes slide shows of anonymous sports figures in unnamed competitions, brief video clips of guys stealing bases and sailboats coming about, sound clips from announcers who are terribly excited about something, and so on. It's like watching TV a half-second at a time. The utility programs give you tools to hook up selections from these de-contextualized media bites into your Windows environment: wallpaper, system sounds, that kind of thing. The result is not utterly useless, but it's close.
I'm in love with this. If you're a connoisseur of CD-ROMs that suck, this is the deal for you: 10 unwanted, abandoned CD-ROMs repackaged in one convenient, 5-foot-long vinyl package. There's PC Animation Festival, which is full of stuff that might have seemed cool three years ago but is just tedious today. The nadir, though, is PC Karaoke, Classic Oldies. All I can say is that if I'm drunk enough to sit at my computer and sing "Danny Boy" and "Harrigan," I'm drunk enough that I shouldn't be anywhere near my computer.
CD-Romix: Prime #1: US$24.95. P.O. Box 2961, Torrance, CA 90509. Leonardo The Inventor: $US49.95. Interactive Electronic Publishing Corp.: (800) 472 8777, +1 (914) 426 0400, fax +1 (914) 426 2606. Escape With Your Life: US$ 49.95. Villa Crespo Software: +1 (708) 433 0500, fax +1 (708) 433 1485. ESPN Sports Shorts: US$39.95. Moon Valley Software: (800) 473 5509, +1 (805) 781 3890. 5 FT. 10 PAK, Volume I: US$29.95. Sirius Publishing: (800) 247 0307, +1 (602) 951 3288, fax +1 (602) 951 3884.
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CD-ROMs That Suck
