There's a woman sitting in front of a TV. When you click on her head, it wobbles, shrivels up like a balloon with a fast leak, and sinks into a hole that has opened up where her neck used to be. Then, a creature looking very much like Edgar Allan Poe, but with the body of a chicken sporting a pair of diplomat's trousers, flutters out. And you'd better click on it before it flies off the screen - quickly, now, or you'll end up in the Penälty Bøx.
This is what life is like in the deeply deranged world of Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time. Monty Python's CD-ROM presents a multilayered, immersive world that's a little like that of Myst. The difference is that the world of Myst is eerie and haunting, and this one is insane.
Fortunately, it's all strange in the same way so you aren't lost in a chaotic structure. Instead, you get caught up in how parts are interrelated and weave together to form a whole.
Just about everything you click on does something unexpected. Chanting Australians emerge from behind the wainscoting. Cars screech across the living-room floor and plunge into manholes. Objects explode. Ambulances perform tricks. Bare-bottomed cancan girls fart demurely. And god help you if you press F1 for help.
The real discovery on this CD-ROM is that Terry Gilliam's collage-based style of animation is perfect for the multimedia computer. It pushes the technology to a comfortable level, it looks great, and a quite a lot of it can be stored in relatively little space.
What Gilliam has done with it here is so weird and hilarious you almost resent having to give up space for the other multimedia goodies on the CD - clips from the TV show, sound bites you can add to your Windows environment, very odd screen savers, and a couple of silly but amusing games.
The clips of Monty Python's TV show are still fresh and funny after 25 years. Everyone I've shown this to has howled when a dirty vicar bellows "I love tits!" and hurls himself on a parishioner. And it's great to hear John Cleese sneer at me when I turn on my computer in the morning. The new work Terry Gilliam has done in putting this together is a revelation.
Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time for Windows: US$59.95. 7th Level Inc.: +1 (214) 437 4858, fax +1 (214) 437 2717.
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