Evolution
Reviewed by Ty Brewer
Published by Expert Software

Age Group: Age 8 and Up Type: Science Price: $15 US

PC version requires:
486-66, 8 M RAM, 3 M hard drive

Mac version requires:
Mac LCII or better; System 7.0 or higher

Description:

This title allows the user to explore the entire path of mankind's evolution, from the "rat" days to the more recent "stooped over" days. Users can observe the links between the species in visual and animated representations. The Evolution of Man also offers the evolution of the Theory of Evolution, from Creation to Darwin to modern genetics

Features:

• Cheap
• Inexpensive
• Doesn't cost a lot
• May impress your friends that your kid is studying

Technical Aspects:

I had plenty of problems with the CD. I've used my CD-ROM on many CDs and never heard it make the sounds I heard here - rapid ticks. For the sake of politeness, I'll assume I received a "bad CD" and won't blame performance on this anomaly. But if this CD was built correctly, then this title is complete junk. For $15 you can afford the risk, right?

I have a pretty difficult time liking any application that shows a good 60 seconds of "introductory" material - you know the type: "look at the company that made this title in 3D animation, meant to impress you with how good the game beyond must be." In this case, hitting "Escape" to skip the intro only takes you back to Windows. I learned instead to use the "space bar." For some reason, the interface designer decided that the "escape" key, while a standard with all other applications for stopping action, should go to the extreme and take you out of the game entirely. Without even asking you if you're sure. That's annoying.

Report and Conclusions:

The title starts with some nifty animation - obviously high quality stuff. Then it's all downhill. The interface is quite awkward. Screens are filled with black spaces, or buttons without labels. Worse, when you move your mouse over an item, the whole program pauses to read in some information from the CD. Then, if you're lucky, a small text message will appear with a vague reference as to what the button might do. An especially annoying feature is how the text message is not blank by default, but filled with the text of the message of the first button you hover over.

The screen where you can watch an animated "morph" between two species and their physical features such as their skull, took me 5 minutes to figure out. That's because the sceen is filled with blank buttons and blank boxes and absolutely no guidance. Even after I figured out how to create a morph, I wasn't really able to modify the animation to show me other sequences. Oh well, the animations were quite jerky and not worth more than 30 seconds of entertainment.

As far as content goes, the CD isn't completely lacking, but does make quite an effort to hide the content beyond 10-12 mouse clicks. Maybe I'm just being silly here, but having clickable links between related subjects would have been nice. As it is, the entire content of the title is chopped up into one and two paragraph infobits, which require, at a minimum, three clicks between each item.

I realize the title is aimed at youngsters "10 and up," but they should have been more honest. The content delivery is definitely below high school level. Some narration is downright juvenille, like when the narrators (male and female) begin to argue with each other. I kept expecting the female to call the male an "under-evolutionized hominid" or something equally dull. On the other side of the coin, the title makes heavy use of scientific language - something even a college graduate might find confusing. In the end, instead of teaching the theory of evolution, the CD delivers lots of pictures of animals along man's evolutionary path, complete with scientific names and the carefully worded text of a scientific publication (you know the type, it doesn't actually say anything, but implies something, which may, or may not, be later proved inaccurate as the predominant theories evolve).

A nice promise, but much is left undelivered. Among the many flaws in this title, the inability to extract the information contained on this CD was the most frustrating. Expert Software continues their tradition of offering bargain software. In this case, a $10 program found in a $15 package - not nearly as much of a ripoff as other vendors, but still not worth the purchase.

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