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With over 900,000 subscribers, “Travel & Leisure” is the world’s leading travel magazine as well as one of the best. Its thoughtful, well-written articles and lush photography has informed and entertained travelers since 1971. With Great Cities Europe, the magazine has teamed with Creative Multimedia to produce a CD-ROM designed to serve their print audience. It’s a lovely product, with many well- produced QuickTime movies, slide shows of great art, and a well-selected variety of classical music to set the mood. In spite of all this, this double CD program doesn’t really deliver the goods, falling well short of a good guidebook.
Installing the CD through Windows is a snap and in minutes you’ll be looking at a map of Europe with national flag icons representing cities such as London, Edinburgh, Rome, and Vienna. Clicking on a flag brings up a more detailed street map of the city and clicking on any of the topic buttons on the right side of the screen will load new icons on the city map for categories like neighborhoods, sightseeing and museums. Click on any of these icons and you’ll find yourself treated to a narrated QuickTime movie featuring the pubs of London or a brief tour through an ancient castle in Edinburgh. These movies are the real highlight of Great Cities Europe, tantalizing you with tidbits of the real travel experience. With 15 cities to choose from, you can easily find yourself happily clicking your way through Europe as you load movie after movie.
In addition to the movie clips, Great Cities Europe offers slide shows of varying size for most of the museumsf eatured on the discs. The digitized artwork is truly beautiful and as high in quality as anything on Microsoft’s Art Gallery and any number of other similar programs. A scattered few of the represented works even have a brief snippet of interesting, if not terribly in depth, critique.
On the left side of the screen you’ll find icons dealing with the more mundane aspects of travelling. The Weather icon opens a nifty, very useful weather data index that can give you a month by month breakdown of any number of various weather conditions, from average temperatures to the number of sunny days. The Travel & Leisure Guide icon will give you information ranging from a city’s history to tipping practices. This info includes text versions of all the multimedia highlights on the right side of the screen as well as some additional material inexplicably not covered on the other side. It’s dry, simple text but it gets the job done. The Print icon will let you print up stuff and there’s even an Internet button to let you get right online through your own online service. Once online you can access travel updates and make reservations. If you don’t subscribe to AOL, Prodigy, et al, there’s a free version of Spry’s Mosaic Internet browser included on the disc.
With all these flashy features, Great Cities Europe would seem to be a thorough vacation planner with a wealth of attractively presented information. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Your big ticket cities like London and Paris get the most attentionat the decided expense of the rest. While there are several topics of interest addressed for these cities, a city like Edinburgh only gets three and those are skimpily covered at that. Amazingly, the renowned Edinburgh International Festival, an annual three week arts festival, is barely covered in the text guide and not mentioned at all in the multimedia section. Such an omission is hard to understand, especially since so little else is covered for this supposedly “great city”.
Unfortunately, even the topics touched upon in the better covered cities fail to give you much information. The QuickTime movies, while pretty to look at, just barely give you any worthwhile travel facts and at times they are even jarringly abrupt. And while the art slide shows are great to look at, I think most travelers would prefer tips and advice on things to do instead of pictures – if you’re interested in the art odds are you’ll see it when you get there. Most of the valuable data is in the boring text part of the program and even that is severely abbreviated. In this light, the free Internet browser seems to be provided in order to fill in the gaps in the program itself – go online and find out what you need to know. Any halfway decent guidebook would have much, much more information you could use.
While Great Cities Europe is basically sound technically, there were a few little annoyances. The panoramic scenes were slow and choppy in their scrolling on a 486/66 and I entered a weird little part of limbo waiting for a museum picture to load, a strange black limbo-land where only a bobbing hourglass dwelled. Plus, just for laughs, the cities listed on each disc were actually on the other disc.
In the end, Great Cities Europe is a very attractive product that might whet your appetite for a European tour. Armchair tourists will very probably enjoy the colorful QuickTime scenes of these deservedly famous cities. But for anyone actually planning a trip to the continent, you’d be much better served looking elsewhere in planning your trip – for the price of this CD-ROM you could buy three or four good travel guides that would do you much more good.
| Product: | Travel & Leisure – Great Cities Europe |
| Company: | Creative Multimedia |
| Cost: | $29.95 |
486SX IBM PC-compatible running at 33MHZ or above, Windows
3.1 or later, 4MB RAM (8MB RAM recommended), 8MB RAM required for Windows 95, 5MB
hard drive space, 2X CD-ROM drive, 256 color SVGA monitor, SoundBlaster of Windows
compatible sound card.
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