Solar System Explorer

With UFOs and science fiction now back in vogue, the serious side of science is becoming more mainstream too. Solar System Explorer is an attempt to combine the study of space with its exploration, using the fictional craft Explorer to take a look around our own nearby surroundings.

You are the Captain of the Explorer, and using the navigation and bridge rooms, you can prepare and follow flight plans to anywhere in the known solar system. Alternatively, you can follow in the footsteps of the Apollo mission to the moon or trace the flight plan of other famous probes. As you move out among the stars, you can see the planets pass by your spaceship windows.

However, despite the uncanny knack displayed by Star Trek captains of stumbling across new life, space travel is about as interesting as watching paint dry. Being able to speed up time and skip whole stages of the flight plan doesn't alleviate the monotony and frustration of the rather jerky movement while proceeding from planet to planet.

You can freeze time, though, which allows you to stop and look around at the surrounding heavens in detail. Solar System Explorer will locate and label specific objects for you, or you can ask it to label all the heavenly bodies if you just want to browse. There's no way of locating the different constellations, though, which is a disappointing omission for star spotters.

The navigation room is used for planning your missions and tracing flight paths using the 3D solar system map. The map, which also shows the various planets in full orbit action, can be rotated and zoomed in and out, though you can't designate a specific area to zoom in on.

The real strength of this title, however, lies in the library and museum rooms. The museum holds details on a number of famous space missions, and there are various video clips and background information on 14 well-known craft. You can also take a close-up look at an accurate recreation in computer graphic form of each probe. But there's one inexcusable omission - the Soviet effort in space. The fact that the first man up there was Yuri Gagarin in the Russian probe, Vostok 1, doesn't even rate a kilobyte of disk space.

While most CD-ROMs fill their library sections with reams of text, Solar System Explorer is packed with audio-visual briefings on each of the planets in the solar system. You can view each planet from a distance and see a close-up map of the surface. A section on 'comparative planetology' shows the effect that various geological and cosmic phenomena can have on the appearance of a planet, and illustrates its points with a number of brief animations.

Solar System Explorer is a well-crafted and engaging package with a good balance of audio, visual and textual elements, but the lack of a search function and hyperlinks, plus some patchy content, spoils an otherwise commendable effort.

Author: Jonathan Bray