The Museum of Anything Goes
"A virtual free-form environment!" says the copy on the box. As any savvy CD-ROM consumer should know, this is multimedia-speak for "This sucks!"
Even at this late date, Wayzata Technology expects consumers to pay good money for a collection of unrelated digital illustrations, home-video art projects, synthesizer doodles, and unfunny Terry Gilliam-wannabe animations. It doesn't make sense. But hey, it doesn't have to: it's multimedia!
If you took 100 monkeys, gave them all cam-corders, copies of Macromedia Director, and a year at art school, this would be the result.
Mirage
In the evil Star Trek mirror universe, where Spock has a beard and the Enterprise terrorizes planets into submission, there's Mirage.
This is clearly a Myst rip-off, albeit set in the Old West. (If you have any doubt, check out The Making of Mirage, a hilariously dreadful CD-ROM that's included.) Mirage puts you into strange landscapes, with weird sounds and eerie lighting effects.
Only there's no point; there's just illiteracy, confusion, and incredible pomposity. Entering the world of Mirage is like participating in a dadaist exercise in meaninglessness staged by people with a sixth-grade education. This may be the worst CD-ROM ever made.
Activision's Atari 2600 Action Pack
Once upon a time, when the world was young and Nolan Bushnell walked the Earth, a company called Activision made US$60 million selling videogame cartridges for the Atari 2600. Games like Oink! and Pitfall, despite their subcartoonish graphics, ratchety sound effects, and one-dimensional gameplay, were the height of Reagan-era cool. They pushed the limits of what a single programmer could be expected to accomplish in assembly language.
You would think Activision might have gotten its money out of this project by now. Apparently not.
Some serious nerds have developed an Atari 2600 emulator that runs under Windows, and now everybody can see what game programs looked like before we had graphics, sound, and disk drives.
On not one, but two CD-ROMs. If you've played any computer game made during the Clinton administration, you'll feel ripped off if you buy one of these. Buy both and you have only yourself to blame.
Explore the Grand Canyon
This is nowhere near as terrible as it could have been, even if the box does urge us to "Take the virtual multimedia adventure of a lifetime!" In fact, for its genre, it's decent. Too bad the genre sucks.
Hypertext is a rotten way to get ideas across. It makes browsing simple, but staying focused on one topic is next to impossible. You might start out reading about the geology of the Grand Canyon, but with a few mouse clicks, you've wandered into a discussion of Anasazi arrowheads with no idea of how or why you got there.
This CD-ROM does include nice pictures, a cool video clip of time-lapse river rafting, and a little 3-D model of the Grand Canyon that you can play with. But the meat here is hypertext, and you won't really learn anything lasting about the Grand Canyon from it. A boring old book would be better - and cheaper.
Dr. Tomorrow's Cyberspace University
Why, it's another virtual free-form environment!
This has the usual 3-D buildings, the pointlessness-and-click interface, the works. Cyberspace U is mighty bad, but Dr. Tomorrow will have you reaching for the reset button. This talking-head technology booster, sort of a Canadian Richard Hart, tells us what the future is going to be like, through the magic of - gasp - QuickTime digital video.
These little speeches are the worst kind of empty-headed gee-whizzery. In the cybersex lecture, for example, Dr. Tomorrow reels off a conversation with one of his Ms. Yesterdays, who agrees to meet him in cyberspace once more for old time's sake.
When he dons his data glove and headset, and starts chatting away about the body stocking lined with piezoelectric vibrotactile actuators, you think, My god, am I going to have to watch this? Fortunately, the answer is no: the body stocking, like Ms. Yesterday, is purely hypothetical. - Robert Rossney
Museum of Anything Goes: US$25. Wayzata Technology Inc.: (800) 735 7321, +1 (218) 326 0597, fax +1 (218) 326 0598. Mirage: US$69.95. Atlantis Interactive: (800) 822 8339, +1 (818) 908 9663, fax +1 (818) 908 1324, on the Web at . Activision's Atari 2600 Action Pack for Windows: US$29.95. Activision Inc: (800) 477 3650, +1 (310) 479 5644. Explore the Grand Canyon: US$44.99. The Coriolis Group: (800) 410 0192, +1 (602) 483 0192, on the Web at www.coriolis.com. Dr. Tomorrow's Cyberspace University: US$29.95. Brentwood Interactive: +1 (818) 879 9090, fax +1 (818) 879 9101, on the Web at www.nas.com/brentwood/.
STREET CRED
Adventure by EarPaging Goes Two Ways
CD-ROMs That Suck
Hey Buddy, Can You Spare a Hotel?
