MICHAEL BOLTON TO THE RESCUE! WELL, MAYBE NOT...
A Review of Music Screeners
by Robert Coffey
Screensavers are hard to figure out. Since they're triggered when you're not
paying attention to your computer, who cares what they are? You're on the
phone, out of the room, or otherwise distracted - most of the time you're
not going to see that clever little program rescue your monitor from
sizzling itself to death. Yet screensavers have become one of the more
popular products by offering users a chance to define themselves in an
environment where they usually can't. In the fairly sterile PC environment
you can arrange your Windows icons however you want, but there's not much
more you can do to make a personal statement. Screensavers give you a chance
to make part of the computer your own, to show off your ironic whimsy with
flying toilets or to betray a potential predisposition to geekhood with
various Star Trek scenarios. Sony Music's Music Screeners series lets you
make that statement with music, but it's a pretty limited statement.
Each Music Screener program features a different recording artist, from
Alice in Chains to Michael Bolton. The programs all come with a 40 second
video clip, a couple of games, and, of course, the screensaver feature.
Installing one Music Screener creates a program group to which all future
screeners will be added. This is nice as it keeps them all in one
convenient place and keeps your Windows screen from getting cluttered.
Double-clicking opens the program and takes you to the main carousel, from
which you can load up to five separate artists in different slots. This way
you can load up such an unlikely playlist as Shabba Ranks, Babyface, The
The, Joe Diffie, and the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson. The music
video clips for all the artists can be played from here with a few mouse
clicks.
On the surface it seems you're offered a great deal of variety, but, truth
be told, you're not and that's the big problem with Music Screeners. One of
the things that made the Pythonizer included in "Monty Python's Complete
Waste of Time" so great was the sheer number of different choices in
screensavers and wallpaper. They all featured Monty Python, sure, but each
one was markedly different from the other, thus affording you the pleasure
of changing your screensaver from time to time without feeling stuck in a
rut. Music Screeners offer six different screensaver options, yet there
really is no option Whether you opt for the slide show (where frames of the
video flash on your screen) or the bouncing video selection, you still get
the same short 40 second video. Not only is a 40 second music video clip
pretty unsatisfying, it can become downright maddening played over and over
in a loop the way it is during the screensavers and the included games.
And what about those games? Well, there's just two: Video Match and Video Slide. In Video Match you match video segments in the top half of the screen to segments on the bottom half by clicking on them, kinda like Concentration without the concentrating. Video Slide is a tetris variant where you try to construct an image from the video as segments slide from the top. The games are merely okay in the way that Minesweeper is okay - not a bad way to kill time when the boss isn't looking, but I wouldn't do it for fun.
So is there anything particularly wrong with Music Screeners? Not really, but there's nothing particularly right with it either. It's crippled by a lack of variety that extends to the featured musicians as well. Diplomatically speaking, fans of performers like Michael Bolton and his mild- mannered ilk will have a lot to cheer about while fans of Alice in Chains, well, they just better like Alice in Chains a whole lot. Even at the low price of $10 or less, I'd suggest you apply the money to purchasing a regular music CD and playing it while you worked at your computer. You'll get more bang for your buck and probably enjoy it more.
Multimedia Cafe Scorecard
| Product: |
Music Screeners |
| Company: |
Sony Music Entertainment, Inc.
|
| Cost: |
$10.00 |
System Requirements:
386/32MHZ or faster PC compatible, 4MB RAM, SVGA 256
color graphics adapter and monitor, PC-DOS or MS-DOS 5.0 or later, Windows
3.1 or later running in SVGA mode, 3.5 floppy drive, mouse, sound card
required for audio.
Breakdown:
Entertainment Value 2
Educational Value 1
Concept 2
Depth 1
Interface 2
Overall Score:
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