Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: DK Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe Version 2
Iain Laskey is disappointed by the update to DK's space knowledge fest.
| Product | DK Eyewitness Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe Version 2 |
|---|---|
| Company | GSP/Avanquest |
| Web | www.gspsoftware.co.uk |
| Price | £9.99 |
| We like | A fair amount of information, price |
| We don't like | poor presentation, out of date in many areas, Vista installation |
| Rating | 5/10 |
| Requirements | Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista |
When the CD-ROM first came out, people got really excited. Companies waxed lyrical about the interactive titles they would be producing with sound, videos (amazing back then) and high quality images. The first few titles trickled out and were under whelming in the extreme. Then Dorling Kindersley, famed for their high quality books and production values decided to release flurry of titles. Suddenly, everyone else's efforts looked silly.
The DK titles looked superb compared to the competition, they oozed quality, had interfaces to die for and used all the features we'd been promised to make learning fun and interactive.
After a few years of wowing PC users and probably selling a fair few CDROM drives to people just so they could use their titles, DK seemed to lose interest and the stream of new titles dried up.
When we found out that some of the titles had been given an update, we were really excited to see how they now looked. The Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe's box promised Vista compatibility so we started to install on to our Vista test bed and immediately hit a brick wall. There was an error on installing and when we tried to run, it complained about missing a wing32.dll file. Contacting support turned out to be interesting as they were initially confused and insisted it wasn't Vista compatible after all. Eventually we got help from someone that knew what to do and we were soon up and running. The install error should be ignored on Vista and the wing32.dll file can be downloaded from the support web site. Note that the instructions for installing the file on Vista are useless and assume you can just drop a file in to the system32 folder - one Vista jealously protects. We had to open a command prompt using 'run as administrator' to bypass Vista's protection of the system32 folder.
We then fired up the the Encyclopedia of Space and the Universe with bated breath. Amazingly, the screen resolution was changed to 800x600 before the dithered low colour interface appeared - something we'd not seen a title do for nearly a decade. The wing32.dll file should have been a warning - that was the precursor to DirectX. This title was still in Jurassic mode graphics wise. It looks unbelievably dated.
We started to explore and found that while there is certainly a fair amount of information here, the bulk does not appear to have been updated - Pluto is still a planet, Mir still exists (it was destroyed in 2001) and a whole bunch of recent probes don't exist. The version 2 is earned by the addition of a test room with 4 interactive experiments which have no explanation and basically offer sliders and knobs to change light beams or waveforms. There is also a new picture gallery but at such low resolution and with dithered colours, the pictures are all pretty poor. The videos are blocky too and in most cases add little value. The interface itself is rather cumbersome compared to what we'd expect these days and it took a while to work out how to get about with things not working the way you'd expect.
So, what's good? There's plenty to read and there's a lot more here than just details of planets and probes. You can find out about various famous people in the field, how to plan and run a space mission, how human's fare in space on long missions and so on. The amount of text is minimal though but at least you can move on to related topics easily. It's also fairly cheap at a tenner (or a fiver at Amazon).
Parents will also be pleased to see it supports the National Curriculum at key stages 2,3 and 4 and covers a number of areas such as the beginning of the universe, gravity effects and the history of astronomy.
Conclusions
We really wanted to like this update. Back in the day, Dorling Kindersley were one of the trailblazers of interactive titles releasing titles that were well ahead of the pack both in terms of being early to market and setting a bar in quality few firms could match. Unfortunately, this title has barely changed since its first release. Yes, there are a few new features but too much of the core information has remained untouched and the presentation is straight put of Window's ancient history - it's like your stuck in a time warp which is ironic given the subject matter. On the plus side, it's cheap and very undemanding of system spec so should run on anything. If you have the first version, there's nothing of interest here, if not, it's worth a punt but a few hours Googling will give you better videos, photos and more timely data. We'd really like to see a version 3 rewritten from scratch as a modern Windows application with new pictures, videos and up to date information as the publishers really missed an opportunity with this update.
