Sights and Sounds of Multimedia
By George Harding
Return to Mysterious Island …
This is another of the wonderful Adventure Company games, and is based on the Jules Verne novel Mysterious Island. You play as Mina, a young woman shipwrecked and stranded on an island in the South Pacific. You are alone and must figure out how to escape from the island. You have a fancy cell phone with a GPS, but have no reception. To make matters worse, your battery is about dead!
At this point, you can move about the island. You must find and store in your inventory many items you find on the beach. The first priority is to find some food, since you’re very hungry, but nothing is in sight. You see coconut trees, a small pond and a place where a fire was once burning. A little exploration turns up a fish in the pond, some oysters on the rocks next to the pond and two crabs eating a dead porcupine. The oysters have to be cooked before you can eat them, so you have to figure out a way to start a fire. The crabs pinch you when you try to pick them up. Hmmm…
You explore and find what you need to create a knife, flint and some turtle and bird eggs. A great breakfast! With the knife, you stab the crabs and cook them, along with the oysters. You are also able to make a small pole with which to catch the fish, and cook him too.
Maneuvering in the game is easy with a mouse. Moving it left or right changes your view. The cursor shows where you can move (click to proceed in that direction) and it changes to indicate something you can pick up to add to your inventory. The challenge is to find everything you will need now and later in the game. Many things are obvious as you look around, but some are difficult to find.
The inventory page is reached by a right-click. Here you can store all the things you pick up, which will be quite numerous before the game is over. You can combine certain items to create others. For example, the driftwood and piece of metal can be combined to form a knife. A piece of metal and the flint can be used to make a spark. Some combined items can be disassembled into their component parts, others cannot. Depending on what you need at various points in the game, you have to assemble, then disassemble items.
Now that you are no longer hungry, you can explore. Going up a path takes you to the plateau. Proceeding along the path takes you to a junction of several paths. You need to go on each one to get stuff you need later. After you collect those things, you need to deal with a bunch of monkeys throwing stones at you, although they are too far away to do any damage.
After you subdue the monkeys, you find an injured monkey and name him Jep. Again, you have to go many places to find the things you need to repair several devices and prepare the bandages and remedies to bring Jep back to good health. This is necessary, because Jep’s help will be needed later. After you and Jep settle down for a nap, you have a dream that Captain Nemo visited you, but you cannot be sure it was only a dream. He wants you to bury his body and give it a proper burial.
Saving the game at various points is necessary. You can save unlimited times and go back, if need be, to redo a prior part or get something you missed the first time through.
After you gather some more items and combine some properly, you go back to the beach and have Jep scramble up the mountainside with a rope ladder. You climb the ladder to find a cave containing, among other things, Nemo’s body. You use some of the items in the cave to form a coffin and lower it to the beach. Here you find a giant oyster with a huge pearl inside.
You explore the cave and find many things you will need later. There are several documents and maps that tell you where you are and prove that the island was once inhabited. One of the documents tells how to combine various chemicals to form some acids and a battery to recharge your phone. You can now hear your Mother, but cannot transmit. Oh well!
Back in the cave you continue to explore, finding a pit with a ladder leading into it. When you go down, you find a large pool and a monster that tries to get you, but you scramble up the ladder just in time! You are able to construct a diving suit and air tank from what you find in the cave, go back down to the pool and go under. What you find is Nemo’s submarine Nautilus.
There’s a red button on the side. Should you push it? Of course! A control panel comes up with another button. When you press that, a panel slides open on the hull and a bunch of robots come out. Danger! Now you’re in trouble, because the robots will kill you if you don’t kill them first (only temporarily fatal!). You find them all over the island. It takes cunning to get them all and capture their thrusters.
Four robot deaths and several puzzles later, you are back at the Nautilus finding out how to gain access to Nemo’s secrets and escape from the island.
The graphics in the game are quite remarkable! The very modest hardware requirements for the game would lead you to believe that the visual experience will be basic, but that’s not so. The scenes are quite beautiful. As you move around, you have a full 360 degrees of view, including up and down. The sound is, likewise, very good.
This is a great game, challenging and enjoyable. Very modestly priced, too, considering all the enjoyment to be had!
Return to Mysterious Island by The Adventure Company adventurecompanygames.com About $20
Requires WIN 98 or better, P3 600 MHz, 64 MB video card, 64 MB RAM
PC-cillin Internet Security 2005 …
Everyone knows today about the dangers of the Internet – viruses, spam, spyware and more! Not too long ago, one piece of software was all that was needed to protect you from harm, but now each danger has spawned new software to protect against that particular risk.
Few companies have developed comprehensive software to protect you from all the currently known risks. Trend Micro is one of those few. PC-cillin Internet Security does it all: antivirus, firewall, spyware and adware, spam, phishing and Wi-Fi intrusion.
A firewall is good protection against hackers, who can access files and data on your computer and use or damage them without your knowledge. While there is less of a risk for dial-up Internet connections, both always-on and dial-up connections should be protected by a firewall.
Spyware and adware is downloaded to your computer without your knowledge and reports your activities to a web site. While this might seem to be innocuous, what’s dangerous is that social security and credit numbers may be some of what is being captured. It can also be the source of spam.
Spam is not harmful by itself, but it cuts down on your productive time and can be the source of other problems. There have been many tries by software companies to halt the mounting flow of spam, but none has yet been totally successful. Legal action has been tried, too, but it is difficult to gather enough damning evidence to get a court verdict.
Phishing involves tricking you into divulging your personal information for bank accounts, credit cards and other finanacial instruments. Once divulged, the person uses the information to empty your checking account, get new credit cards in your name, and go on a buying binge. This is probably the most dangerous of the Internet risks, because it can cause monetary loss. In some cases, the loss has been severe and the damage to one’s credit history takes years to repair.
I regularly get emails reporting that XYZ is validating my personal information and asks me to go to a web site to check it out. The trick is that the web site is not what it purports to be, although it may look identical to my bank’s web site. You should never respond to an email such as this.
Wi-Fi intrusion is somewhat less of a risk than the other items. If you have a wireless network set up at home or office, if it is not encrypted, others can access and use your Internet connection for their own purposes. This might be a neighbor, a car outside your residence or others. It takes little effort to turn on strong encryption, which will protect you against such an intruder.
PC-cillin Internet Security protects you against all these risks and more. When you first install the software, it does a scan of your computer to find any existing problems. The software sets itself up to periodically check all incoming data, including email. It also frequently updates itself so that it can identify not only viruses that have been around for a while, but also protect against the newest risky stuff.
This is a great way to be as protected as possible today and to stay that way.
PC-cillin Internet Security by Trend Micro trendmicro.com
Price about $50 for one year’s service and support
Requires WIN 98 or better, Pentium 233 MHz, 64 MB memory (128 MB for XP), 100 MB hard disk space
WindowBlinds …
Don’t like the Windows looks? Change it with WindowBlinds. Don’t like the way Word looks? Change with WindowBlinds. Don’t like the action animations that Microsoft provides? Change them with WindowBlinds. Don’t like the way your toolbars and icons look? Change them with WindowBlinds.
It’s easy to see there are lots of customization options in WindowBlinds. If you like to play around with the way Windows looks and acts, this is the program for you!
Skins is the way to alter the appearance of windows, dialog boxes and other apparatus used in Windows. There is a modest selection of skins in WindowBlinds and many others are available. It’s possible, too, to skin individual apps, so each looks the way you want.
An interesting option is the ability to skin a specific app differently from the general. Thus, you can make Word (or any other app) be distinctive.
Windows uses animations for several functions, like file moving/copying, downloading and so on. Here, too, you have the option to change the way these look. One option for file moving/copying is to have a series of 0’s and 1’s flying from one folder to the other, for example.
You can even change the basic User Interface settings, to a certain extent. One interesting change is to change a double click on a title bar from the standard maximize/restore to rollup/restore. Your title bar stays in place, but the rest of the window rolls up into the title bar.
A corporation or business could use WindowBlinds to give their software product a distinctive look and feel, modifying Windows without any fees to or licensing with Microsoft. Even Microsoft uses WindowBlinds to modify the appearance of one of their games!
This is a fun program to play around with! If you want to try it first, you can download a trial version at windowblinds.net.
Window Blinds by Stardock; stardock.com; Price about $20
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