any Macintosh with a hard disk. Recommended: ‘030
processor or greater, 256-color display.
Saving your screen from phosphor burn-in has never
been so much fun! Now you too can waste hundreds of
hours watching Bad Dog trash your desktop, and save on
your hydro-electric bills at the same time! What better
way to keep you and your Macintosh busy.
Being the After Dark fan that I am, I rushed out to buy
Berkeley's latest offering. After Dark 3.0 sports several
new features (none of them terribly earth-shattering) which could conceivably sell this product as an 'upgrade'. Version 3.0 adds module management to the package, finally permitting some degree of module organization. Upon opening the After Dark 3.0 control panel, a small pop-up menu becomes apparent above the module list. Close inspection of this menu will reveal that all screen saver modules are now organized into separate folders: After Dark 2.0, After Dark 3.0, Randomizer, Disney, Star Trek, Third Party, and many others. Having to scroll through my 150+ modules in the older list made the ratio of ‘productive time vs. waste of time’ very imbalanced.
If you are buying After Dark 3.0 for the new modules, you may want to revise your logic. Although Berkeley proudly states that there are “Over 30 Displays” on the fancy and glitzy packaging, only 15 of the modules are actually new. If you are a Fish fiend, the fish seem more lifelike and the sea floor looks a bit more realistic. As for Flying Toasters, brace yourself for some dynamic duos. These new toasters are super-charged! Bad Dog will mesmerize you for countless hours, making you never want to buy a dog. DOS Shell is quite a treat if you want to remind yourself how lucky you are to be using a Macintosh. Daredevil Dan reminds you of Evel Knievel and his wild stunts, including the random bone-crunching mishap.
Although After Dark 3.0 is not PowerPC Native or FatBinary, it is compatible with the Power Macintoshes. AD 3.0's one PowerPC native module shows off to nearby persons what kind of power you have packed away in your Macintosh. The Vista Module draws a ever-flowing and scrolling landscape in real-time. If you have a visual or heart condition, prepare yourself for some gut-wrenching effects.
Apart from the new modules and the new module management there are no other significant changes to After Dark 3.0, save for the set-up interface. The old, drab and kludgy System 6-style interface has been replaced by a prismatic dialog with four setup modes. The 'Setup' window now consists of the General, Password, WallZapper, and EcoLogic modes.
The General Setup gives you options to set your hotkeys, sleep time, SystemIQ, and various other controls. The Password setup now gives you the option to not only set a password on After Dark’s wake up, but now also on your Mac’s startup – so much for disabling the password by turning off extensions! WallZapper is a neat utility that is integrated with After Dark. It allows you to do a screen capture of the currently running module and paste it into your desktop pattern. While this might sound great, those of you who are running Apple’s System 7.5 will probably end up using the Desktop Patterns control panel instead.
The last Setup mode is After Dark’s EcoLogic. I see this as a statement made by Berkeley to capture the eye of the Energy Star program’s enthusiasts. I can just see it, “Be environmentally friendly, buy After Dark 3.0!”. This will cause every government department in the world to go out and buy this product in droves. Is this another marketing gimmick or plain old ingenuity? Even if you don’t use EcoLogic, it will make you realize how much power your Macintosh is consuming, and what kind of savings you can expect from proper power management. EcoLogic is ‘smart’ enough to know which Mac and monitor you are using, and how many watts of power they draw per hour.
Now, besides all of the fancy features and the general review of the product, I’d like to cover a new testing standard that I will be using at the end of every game and utility that I review. This standard is seldom used but can help rate certain aspects of the package as a whole.
The Kaardal Weight Test (or KWT as we will call it) judges the product on Weight vs. Cost criteria. The ratings vary from AA to FF — an AA rating would mean that the product is very light and is inexpensive, whereas an FF would mean that it is very heavy and costs a fortune. A KWT rating on a product would help you to determine if the package has loads of documentation, too many disks, or non existent support materials.
After careful and repeated tests of Berkeley’s After Dark 3.0, we have deemed that the product gets a KWT rating of ‘AB’. The package design is exceptional (as expected from Berkeley Systems), the package comes with two high-density disks, an eight-page fold-out quick reference guide, and a registration card. The package may also contain a rebate offer for previous owners of After Dark. The mail-in card offers registered owners of After Dark v2.0 (and later) to collect a $10 rebate with proof of ownership.
There are a few documented problems with After Dark 3.0, though we came across only one problem ourselves. If you are the proud owner of Norton Utilities for Macintosh v3.0 (covered in MacSense Issue 10), you'll be pleased to know that After Dark conflicts with Norton’s FileSaver extension. This does not result in a system bomb, but rather a simple ‘flicker’. After Dark attempts to sleep but fails; your Mac is rewarded by a screen refresh jolt. Apart from this irritating conflict, Berkeley issued a press release to eWorld last week confirming reports of 28 other little conflicts and bugs. None of these other problems are particularly nasty and I have yet to encounter a system bomb. Berkeley assured readers of this press release that a fix is currently underway and that it will soon be available from various on-line services. Registered owners of After Dark 3.0 will receive the update by mail.
 
  
Microsoft, $99 Cdn, $69 US. Requirements: Any Macintosh
equipped with a CD-ROM drive. Recommended: 256 (or higher)
color or grayscale display with resolution of 640x480 or
greater, double-speed CD-ROM drive.
If you’re looking for a one-stop reference library, you needn’t go
any further than Microsoft Bookshelf. Combining a dictionary, thesaurus, atlas, encyclopedia, almanac, chronology and book of famous quotations, Bookshelf may quickly become the defacto standard for an integrated library package.
Unlike some other multimedia encyclopedia packages on the market, everything in Bookshelf is dynamically linked together. You can choose to find information by looking through one “book” (such as the dictionary), or by looking through all books. After typing in a keyword , Bookshelf will automatically find all entries corresponding to that keyword, and display the headings of the entries in a tidy window to the left of the principal information window. Beside each brief heading there appears a small colored icon which indicates which book the entry is from; if you don’t know which book it is by the icon, you can hold the cursor over the icon and the book’s title will pop up. Holding the cursor over the heading will expand it so that the full heading can be read. Clicking on any heading will result in the information popping up in the principal information window to the right. Bookshelf also offers the option to “note” what you have read – in essence, store the headings of important entries in a personal file so that you can quickly access the information at a later time.
With a control panel called QuickShelf, which places a Bookshelf menu in the upper right hand corner of your Macintosh, you have quick access to Bookshelf from any application. Simply select or highlight a word in your word processor, select “Dictionary Contents” from the QuickShelf menu, and Bookshelf will automatically load and find the definition for the highlighted text.
Though Bookshelf’s dictionary and thesaurus very encompassing and complete, you won’t find a tailored-down version of Microsoft Encarta as the encyclopedia. Instead, Microsoft has used The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia as a basis – an adequate (but much less multimedia oriented) reference. The atlas is impressive, providing such things as elevation, flag information and even the national anthem of many countries. I must indicate, however, that the only country it details by state or province is the United States. (What about Canada?). The inclusion of the almanac, book of quotations, and the chronology round out Bookshelf by providing interesting (though not terribly useful) information.
Bookshelf includes an admirable library of sounds, pictures and video. Almost every subject heading (be it a name, object or place) and dictionary entry has a double-clickable sound icon beside it which pronounces that word. Bookshelf’s many animations detail the inner workings of things, from a simple pulley to CD-ROM drives. While Bookshelf contains remarkably few video clips, the footage included is very interesting.
Though Microsoft Encarta is a much better multimedia encyclopedia, Bookshelf is a much more complete reference library. If you have a CD-ROM drive and are a student, or have teenage children, Microsoft Bookshelf is a worthwhile and educational investment.
 
  
HSC Software, $125 US. Requirements: Macintosh
with 68040 processor with FPU, color display.
Recommended: 24-bit color display.
As legend goes, God created the Earth in six days. With
KTP Bryce, you can now create a new world every 30
minutes on your Macintosh! If you’re an Adobe Photo-
shop guru and spend at least four hours per day fine-
tuning your various Adobe and third-party filters to
produce new and dramatic effects, stop what you're doing and brace yourself. KTP Bryce, HSC Software's latest addition to its Kai Power Tools line, packs quite a punch for the buck. Bryce offers you a near infinite choice of image manipulation and creation tools to build new worlds from scratch. Ever dreamed of designing your own science-fiction alien cover art?
If you have ever used any of HSC’s other tools (such as Kai’s Power Tools v2.1) and are familiar with the custom interface, treading in these waters won’t be too difficult for you. Bryce uses a dynamic 3D interface common to high-end software packages designed for Silicon Graphics workstations or Pixar II computers. If you are used to the simplistic Macintosh interface, you will have initial difficulty with Bryce’s controls. However, after a bit of practice and tinkering, you will never want to quit the application.
After experiencing After Dark v3.0 and having come to the conclusion that it was designed to make you anti-productive, I find myself with similar thoughts about Bryce. I love both Photoshop and KPT products, but spending many a night just playing with Bryce has already caused me to miss an important dealine. Don’t get caught off guard by this demon! It will waste a lot of your time if you just end up buying it to play with it.
Within 15 minutes of having perforated the cellophane wrapper, Bryce was up and running on my Quadra. The first dialog box to pop up allows you to choose rough parameters for your alien world — sky and clouds, mountains and hills, ground and terrain. After clicking on the check mark, Bryce takes you into the Edit and Create mode where you can change viewing angles of your new landscape. After playing with Atmospheric Models and Terrain Generators, entering the Render mode will reveal a set of buttons you can select to add further effects such as haze and fog. You can also render the scene in one of six different image sizes, or one of your own. Selecting the Panoramic render button will modify your final image to have seamless left and right edges. An After Dark module bundled with KPT Bryce will let you view these scrolling images.
We tested KPT Bryce on a Macintosh Quadra 840av and on a Centris 650 with pleasing results. On the Centris, we ran small and uncomplicated renders that took less than 8 minutes to complete. A 1024 x 768 image with a complex shading and haze model took a little over 4 hours to render on the Quadra 840av. The average medium-size image takes less than one hour on a 68040 Macintosh.
Despite Bryce's stunning power and feature set, we discovered a number of problems. KPT Bryce is FPU-dependent. This means that your Mac must have a math-coprocessor installed to even launch Bryce. To top this off, KPT Bryce is not yet Power Macintosh compatible. In order to use Bryce on a Power Mac, you need to get a copy of the shareware called SoftFPU 3.0 - this will trick applications into thinking that your Mac has a coprocessor. This does cause problems however; Bryce will run extremely slowly because the computer must now software translate all the calculations into code the processor can understand. HSC Software has informed us that a patch is currently underway and will be available shortly from various on-line services.
 
  
LucasArts, $69 Cdn, $49 US. Requirements: Macintosh LC III
or greater (68040 processor recommended), 256-color or
Though it was a long time in coming, PC game manufacturers finally seem to be recognizing the Macintosh platform as a viable and exploitable market. LucasArts’ Rebel Assault was certainly one of the most highly anticipated Macintosh CD-ROM games this year (in our eyes, anyway).
The game finds you as Rookie 1, a civilian trainee from Tatooine, who has just joined the Rebel Alliance in their vigilant battle against the oppressive Empire. It is your mission to blast your way through a multitude of levels (loosely based on the first two Star Wars movies) until you are left with the responsibility of delivering the lethal blow to the Death Star. As Rookie 1, you must survive three vigorous training missions at the onset of the game before the real action begins. Various stages of Rebel Assault will find you battling TIE Fighters and Imperial Star Destroyers, AT-AT Walkers, Imperial Probe Droids and Stormtroopers, until you finally find yourself in the trenches of the Death Star.
To say Rebel Assault is visually stunning would be an understatement. Using a technology called ‘direct screen blast’, the game delivers full-screen, full-motion action from a CD-ROM! Granted, it’s not quite television quality – but if you have a fairly fast Macintosh (with a 25MHz ‘040 or higher), you’ll be blown away by the on-screen action. Every detail of Rebel Assault has been painstakingly three-dimensionally rendered, from the TIE Fighters and X-Wings to the Stormtroopers and planet surfaces. The combination of these stunning visuals with sound effects and a superb musical score keep you completely immersed in the game…for the first few times you play it.
Rebel Assault plays more like a long Star Wars movie than a game, each level linked to the next with a lengthy animated sequence continuing the storyline. Whether the level involves third-person flight, third-person bombing, third person shooting or first-person flight, you’re always shooting something. Though the game does give you a few brief opportunities to choose a direction of attack, Rebel Assault is primarily a linear endeavor. Every time you play the game, you’re faced with the same action…same attack formations, same flight patterns, same things to shoot. While flying through space, you are locked into an ‘automatic flight path’ – meaning you can’t just veer off course and attack Star Destroyers or TIE Fighters at will. Every course of action in Rebel Assault is predetermined, which makes the game very boring, very fast. Thankfully, the game gives you passwords upon the completion of a level so that you may skip ahead the next time you play, thereby avoiding some major repetition.
If nothing else, Rebel Assault is a spectacle to be seen. It does have an engaging plot line, and it’s movie-style presentation is certainly entertaining, even if only for a short time.
