For anyone even vaguely interested in Star Trek this interactive four CD-ROM set from Simon & Schuster Interactive has got to be the must have addition to a software collection. With a fully cross referenced database of every imaginable subject, object, person or thing ever to appear in any episode or film and a collection of drawings, diagrams and photographs, numbering in the thousands, this is one CD-ROM that won't be leaving the desktop in a hurry.

There are over 400 QuickTime video and movie clips with everything from Next Generation and Deep Space Nine trailers to the likes of escape pods leaving a doomed Enterprise and a Borg Queen preparing to give Data a hard time.

But none of this would be much use without an intuitive and easy to use interface which ultimately allows you to move around within the database, and that's where the Star Trek style desktop comes into its own, the one which everyone from Spock to Geordie have spent hours tapping and talking to.

Obviously you won't be doing much tapping and talking, but you will hear Majel Barrett's voice as you enter commands using your primitive mouse (there's actually a QuickTime clip showing Scotty speaking into a mouse connected to a Mac Classic, from the movie The Voyage Home).

Most of the voice prompts and instructions are accompanied by a series of beeps which are spot on when it comes to emulating the computer tones used in the original series. Other than those expect to hear little else when it comes to ambience, after all none of the computers used in any Star Trek episode ever played mood music so why should yours.

After a few hours looking around and checking out the QuickTime movies I got quite adept at making bookmarks and saving links to commonly visited places, which really resembles the way in which the web is surfed, making it ultra easy to navigate.

All in all an excellent product. Extremely well researched by Star Trek experts Michael and Denise Okuda and expertly put together by the people at Imergy using the latest multimedia technologies from Macromedia and Apple.

Engage.

Rating - 737,289 (out of a possible 1,000,000)

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