READ WITH ASTERIX: ASTERIX AND SON by EuroTalk - £29.99
CDTV Entertainment disc
Reviewed by Simon Plumbe
I won't bore anyone with the details of who Asterix is. If you haven't read any of the books, seen the cartoons or even just heard of the character, you won't be even vaguely interested in buying this CD anyway!
Following on from their education series teaching foreign languages using the Asterix books as a basis, this CD takes a different viewpoint and uses the characters to try to encourage children to read more. Okay, if you love the Asterix books, then the humour and story will appeal to any Asterix fan, but as an educational title, it would be best aimed squarely at young children. However, EuroTalk decided to market this as an "Entertainment" release, so I'll try and view it as such.
What you get for your money is one of the Asterix books, namely "Asterix And Son" in a computerised form. All of the illustrations from the book (over 400 of them) have been digitised and are accompanied by a reading of the story by a number of actors, in the form of a full audio soundtrack with music and sound effects.
The main menu on the CD offers just three basic options. First is a brief introductions to the characters (including the voices of the actors playing them) - it's rather short but it's a nice way to introduce the readers (viewers?) to the characters if they are unfamiliar with them.
Next comes the bulk of the CD. The two following options are basically variations on the same theme. The first allows the user to read the "book" at his/her own pace just like reading the original version, displaying the frames of the comic strip one at a time. As this progresses you can listen to the dialogue to accompany each frame, or just read in silence.
The other option is to just sit back and let the CD take over and it runs the full story in words and pictures and it runs for about an hour. Apart from the lack of user-input, it's identical to the previous option.
Basically that's it, and that is where the problem lies. After listening to the story once, I can't really see many people going back to re-listen to it all that frequently. For a disk that is at best, going to be used on very rare occasions, it should have been priced far more reasonably. However, that's not my real gripe with the CD.
The pictures are generally well digitised, although they are only (as far as I can tell) in medium resolution 16 colours. Some of the images do suffer slightly from this, having too many colours to reduce down of being too detailed for the resolution to cope with. With the storage space available on the CD, it wouldn't have been too difficult for the producers to include some HAM images or a few hi-res ones, would it?
Also, instead of making use of the CD as an ideal audio medium, EuroTalk decided to sample the entire audio track. While this may be more efficient in terms of storage space, there was no need for them to do so on this CD as the full title including sound only takes up around a quarter of the CD. If the sound was in the original CD format, they could have quite easily left the CD audio intact. What makes things worse is that the soundtrack seems to have been sampled at a ludicrously low sample rate and is full of noise and interference. Surely they could have increased the sample rate to something reasonable like 20K a second?
I can't fault the story itself (being an Asterix fan) and it's full of all the usual humour you'd expect to see, Asterix and Obelix arguing and making up almost immediately, thousands of Roman soldiers performing their duty as punch bags for the heroic Gauls and I'd say it's one of the better books in the range.
Ultimately however, I was very disappointed with this disc. Considering that the original book would only cost around £6 and the video (I THINK it was released on video) would have only cost £12, to ask £30 for this is beyond belief. If there had been an additional 2 or 3 books on the CD, then I would have no problems in recommending this, but as it stands, avoid it unless you can buy it at a sub-£15 price tag.
