February 5, 2007

Fun With Artificial Lifeforms (ages 8 to 108)

Creatures: Exodus (**** out of four) is the second in the Creatures series of simulation games that lets you explore artificial life forms within other worlds and environments--all in colorful, masterfully created surroundings.

The artificial life forms are called Norns, who are cute, loveable creatures and who live in a spaceship that was designed many centuries ago by the ancient race of Shee to carry themselves and their genetic creatures to a new spherical planet. The ship consists of four terrariums, each housing a particular set of species and having its own set of plants and animals. Each terrarium is connected by a central corridor, with a bridge and engineering section at each end. There are also many other doors with shortcuts to go from one terrarium to another, but beware--these doors can be used by the enemies to mount a sneaky attack on Norns and their eggs.

You begin Exodus by choosing to use two pre-trained Norns or the eggs that take you to the egg laying machine where you can hatch eggs to breed and then train your own Norns. Either way, you are totally responsible for your Norns: you must see to it that they eat well, rest when they are tired, avoid diseases and infections, learn to communicate and to behave properly, and much more. You can name your Norns and their environment and have total control over what they do and where they go.

You’ll have to be sure to keep your Norns away from the Grendels, because they carry diseases or will beat up your Norns if you aren’t careful. There are also Ettins, who were trained to be workers/cleaners and caretakers, but their idea of cleaning up is to remove everything not stapled down. Ettins are harmless to your Norns, but they’re not very sociable.

In addition to dealing with the Grendels and Ettins, you’ll also need to spend time teaching your Norns how to speak and how to act in their environment. Norns can express feelings, such as happy, sad and the like, and you can teach them to drop or pick up items, hit (in defense), eat, look at items and more. You can do the teaching yourself or use the auto teacher so you can take care of other chores. If your Norns get sick (they can sneeze, shiver and the like so you’ll know they’re sick), you can diagnose the problem and choose from the wide selection of treatments available; or take them to the medical center, where there are even more treatments options. You can breed your Norns too; after all, little Norns are needed to keep the population moving forward. If your Norns die, you have to bury them, create a tombstone and then help other Norns move on with life.

All this activity takes place against colorful, detailed backgrounds that include beautiful flowers and charming animals, depicted during both day and night. The twinkling galaxies and stars displayed at night add a mystical setting to the game.

Web users can play, chat and discuss the activities and exchange ideas and objects on the official web site.

Exodus is filled with intriguing and challenging activities, and there’s a 46-page on-disk instruction manual to help you through all the intricacies involved. This is a highly involved game, but if you move forward through it all you’ll be rewarded with hours and hours of game play and a population of happy, healthy Norns.

Easy SlideShow (***) lets you easily and quickly create a simple slide show from your pictures and then save and share the results for viewing on a computer. The program uses a step-by-step wizard to guide you through the process of creating your slide show. You first choose the pictures you want in the show by dragging and dropping from selected folders to the selection frame. If needed, you can rotate pictures here.

Next step is to put the photos in the order you want them to appear, select any transitions you want from the limited choice (none, zoom, rotate or mosaic) to use between photos. Next add a title, pick the length of time the slides and transitions will appear during the show, choose the resolution (picture quality) and, if you want, add an MP3 format music file for background. Create and save the slide show in either WMV or ASF formats. Either format can be played by Windows Media Player for easy sharing with family and friends.

A note about resolution: the higher the resolution, the better the photos will look, but the larger the file size. The background music will be faded automatically at the end of the show, or if the music is shorter than the show, the program automatically repeats it. The length of time each photo and transition appears will be the same for all, since there’s no way to individualize times. One final caveat: once the slide show has been created and saved, you can’t go back and edit it to remove or add a photo or change the music. The only way to do this is to recreate the whole show.

The program works well and runs from the program file alone, requiring no installation. A good value despite its limitations.

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