|
You may also be interested in these review sites...
|
Aqua Real 2, by Formosoft International Inc., has the best combination of believable fish, vivid backgrounds and overall feature set. That’s why we gave it our highest honor, the “TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award.”
Aqua Real 2 is truly stunning when you first see it. Every scene has a sense of visual depth that most of the other programs we reviewed couldn’t achieve. Fish would swim just pass the screen and then travel back into the distance and pass behind coral, plants and shipwrecks. The scenery looks fantastic, but the real strength of the program is in the fish. Aqua Real 2 has some of the most life-like fish that we’ve seen, and their movements and behaviors are completely realistic.
Add to that the great features, like feeding the fish and music playback, and a simple interface and Aqua Real 2 stands out as the clear winner in our aquarium screensavers review.
We really like the interface in Aqua Real 2. Simply right-clicking anywhere on the screen will bring up a small menu with options for tickling, feeding and summoning the resident shark in each scene.
The setup menu is straight forward and easy to use, with options for customizing visuals and sound. Aqua Real 2 also has the ability to work in fullscreen and windowed mode, but one of our favorites is the option to use it as an active desktop. This means the program runs as a wallpaper behind all your icons and other windows.Aqua Real 2 has a lot of features that make it more than just a screensaver. You can interact with the fish by feeding them and touching them with a hand icon. The fish react accordingly, and they will even react to the presence of aggressive species of fish swimming nearby. With fullscreen and windowed modes, you can interact with them for as long as you want
This program comes with 26 different types of fish to choose from and can have a total of 48 fish onscreen at once. The backgrounds seem large enough that they can hold a lot more fish than other programs can without looking crowded. There are only three backgrounds to choose from, which disappointed us a little until we found out that the manufacturer offers free downloads of two more backgrounds and three more fish species on the Aqua Real 2 website.
Our favorite feature by far has to be the music playback function. This is fairly new in the world of aquarium screensavers, but we like it because it allows you to create a playlist of your own music so you can create whatever mood you like while the program runs.The scenery in Aqua Real 2 is very realistic, with coral, plants and anemones that sway with the current. We really liked the way the backgrounds seemed to have a lot of depth. This gave the fish more room to swim and made it feel more like you are truly in the ocean instead of in a fish tank.
We did have one major problem with the scenery though. In two scenes there are animated anemones that provide cover for the clownfish and anemonefish. The anemones sway realistically in the currents and when pushed aside by fish, but they still look so fake that they were a major distraction. They looked like they belonged in a cheap video game rather than in this beautiful setting. We hope that the manufacturer can come up with a way to render the anemones better or make them look more realistic in future versions.©2008 TopTenREVIEWS, Inc.
![]() |
|||