Mobile Suit Gundam - Illustration World Volume 1

MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM - ILLUSTRATION WORLD VER. 1
Hybrid Mac/Win CD-ROM
MMCR-0001
ISBN4-89601-244-5
Developer: Sunrise
Releaser: Movic
¥7004 (tax included)
Copyright © Sunrise / Sotsu Agency

— by Albert Wong

This multimedia CD-ROM is a hybrid Macintosh and Windows CD-ROM. It starts off its presentation by playing an original music score not unlike something from the original GUNDAM series. As it plays, the presentation displays an illustration of the RX-78 Gundam with other Gundam variations fading into the background. As the music repeats over and over, there are no prompts instructing the user to click the mouse to continue onto the rest of the presentation. Oh well, natural instinct saves me again.

The title screen appears using a 3d rendered text of "MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM" along with some spot light effects that sweep over the text. Next the main interface to this CD-ROM appears. It looks very much like a generic Gundam cockpit, complete with left/right control handles, various buttons, and a medium sized display area in the center of the screen. Clicking on a little green light at the top of the control panel brings up a help screen describing the function of the various buttons and controls.

Using the control handle on the right, you can select the various GUNDAM series, ranging from the original MOLBILE SUIT GUNDAM, ZETA GUNDAM, DOUBLE ZETA GUNDAM, CHAR'S COUNTER ATTACK, GUNDAM 0080, GUNDAM F91 and GUNDAM 0083. The control handle on the left presents choices such as Character Drawings, Mechanical Drawings, Illustrations, Gundam History, Gundam Keywords, and Gundam Data.

But enough fooling around with the user interface. In the character section, you can view 155 lo-resolution black-and-white character sketches covering many of the characters from the original GUNDAM series. In the mechanical section, you can scroll through over 240 mechanical design sketches. You can also use a rudimentary indexing system to choose an image that you want, instead of scrolling through a series of images. These screens are also accompanied by three original tracks to listen to while scrolling through the images.

The remaining sections have a similar interface where you scroll through various illustrations and text, while some music track plays in the background. It gets repetitive very quickly. I also noticed that in the illustration section for the GUNDAM 0083 series, there are images from SD-GUNDAM, CD images and other unrelated images. Probably stuck in as filler.

So, is this CD-ROM a replacement for the GUNDAM ILLUSTRATION WORLD book? I can say that the collection of images is fairly complete and includes the Gundam keywords and history sections that are not present in the book. It is unfortunate that the color images are only low-resolution 256 color, so in this aspect the book is better than the CD-ROM. Taking everything into account, I would say that this CD-ROM would make a welcome addition for any GUNDAM fan.