Webster's Millennium 2003 Multimedia Guide to The Universe

by Multimedia 2000

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 10.1 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00006H2YT
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 30, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #30,267 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars There must be something better!, April 24, 2005

By 

amanooensis (Flyover Country) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Webster's Millennium 2003 Multimedia Guide to The Universe (CD-ROM)

Just tried installing this package under XP, using various compatibility modes. I finally had to reset the entire PC to a lower resolution display to compensate for the software's inability to change resolutions correctly.

You can find other kids' software, even if it's slightly older, that correctly resizes itself to whatever screen you have. These three programs don't do that. There are too many bugs and quirks to mention here, but my overall impression is that the programmers were sloppy and totally ignored most standards of the Windows interface, and I'm talking about really old standards, like some of those going back to Win95.

The Voyage through the Solar System program seemed to offer the most fun. You click on a planet and get a brief narrated overview with an image of the planet. For seven of the nine planets, a "Planetary Tour" is offered, which in some cases like a low-altitude flyover and quite fun, with good music.

However, this and the other programs rely a LOT on text that you must stop and read from the screen. My feeling is that this is just like taking a book with photographs, and making it inconvenient to use by slapping it onto a computer.

It's possible that the programs would have worked better on an older machine or a different operating system. But that would not improve the fact that there is a lot more "old" media (still photographs, plain text) in this collection than there is true interactive multimedia.

Evidently it was a big deal to the designers and some consumers that they could press a Print button while looking at some of these pictures, and (I guess) stick that in a homework project to jazz it up. I really don't know. You can get many images for free from the NASA website, and the information about the planets themselves is readily accessible. These programs do not go far enough in exceeding those sources to make them worth owning and installing, in my view. And watch out during the latter -- like many badly-designed software products, one or more of these may attempt to install Windows components overtop the ones already on your computer, and they may be incompatible. Make sure your Windows directory is write protected in some fashion to prevent that.

As my review title suggests, I assume that it's possible to make astronomy software for young kids that is fun, easy to use, not overly complex or data-intensive, and above all, well-designed and programmed with attention to standard Windows protocols. And I'm guessing that such programs cost more than older packages like this. No doubt it's a case of "You get what you pay for."

If you only have a few bucks and want something with planets and galaxies on your computer, this will do the trick. But young users are going to have to do a lot more work (reading text from the screen etc.) than they expect, if they've used any other software before.

Kids can have fun with some parts of it -- basically anyplace where pointing and clicking keep them involved in the content. I think the non-interactive part will go to waste, since most of it can be found in school textbooks or websites (like NASA). So if you're looking for one single, authoritative product, that takes full advantage of the multimedia abilities of modern PCs, I don't think this is it.