HEROIC AGE OF SPACEFILIGHT - NASA: THE 25TH YEAR by Troika Multimedia
Price - £19.99
CDTV Educational title
Reviewed by Simon Plumbe
As you can tell if you've read my introduction, I'm a big Star Trek fan, and as expected, space exploration holds a great deal of fascination for me so when I first purchased my A570 CD-ROM, this was the one CD I was most looking forward to. The CD is basically a cross between an information video and a reference book on space travel, but concentrating mainly on the work conducted by NASA - the National Aeronautical and Space Administration.
The bulk of the CD, as the title indicates, is taken up with "NASA: The 25th Year" - a 50 minute video utilising Commodore's CDXL motion video system. The video details the history of NASA spanning their first 25 years up to and including 1983 when the video was first released in the States. While the CDXL format is limited to just a quarter of the screen in size and is only capable of running at 10 frames a second as opposed to the 25 frames a second used by normal video, the footage is very smooth, and the although the quality of the footage is, to put it mildly, ropey at times, it all holds together rather well and makes for a fascinating hour of viewing.
However, where the CD really comes into it's own is as a reference work. The CD's main menu offers the option to view the entire video or to read information from one of about a dozen topics. Each topic is further divided into information relating to various events in NASA's history. Each topic menu allows you to play a segment of the film relating to that topic or to read one of a number of pieces of text. The information is accurate upto 1991 and the level of detail is amazing. If you ever wanted to know anything about space travel, you can probably find it here! For example, in the section devoted to the Space Shuttle, the disc lists ALL of the shuttle missions complete with FULL crew listings, mission durations and the objectives of the mission. Great stuff!
You can probably guess that, being a Trekker, the first thing I did when I booted the CD was to go to the Space Shuttle section to read about the first ever Shuttle, the ENTERPRISE, launched in 1976. To my surprise, they even included video footage of it's first flight along with a selection of stunning examples of aerial photography!!
The information is further enhanced by the option to display a few associated images to accompany the text. While one or two are taken from the CDXL footage and expanded in size to occupy the full screen, giving them a rather hazy, cheap look to them, the majority are stunning digitised images in interlaced HAM mode!
Words really can't do this disc enough justice. There is so much packed onto this CD that it would take hours to even skim through everything. Just browsing through the disc will offer hours of entertainment and education and even if you don't want to read through it, you have the option of watching a very good video.
As an educational title, there is enough factual information to make any average Amiga owner more than a little familiar with the work of NASA and it avoids the trap most educational title have of being a rather boring lifeless encyclopaedia on disc. As an example of CDTV technology, although this disc is a couple of years old, it really did show what the future of CD software holds for all of us -- it's just a pity that the world wasn't ready for a CD based multimedia player! Overall, this is an essential purchase for anyone who is even vaguely interested in space travel.
