Aquazone Seven Seas Deluxe 2009

TopTenREVIEWS

Aquazone Seven Seas Deluxe is a really good program that needs a little work in the graphics department. This program has a great variety of fish and backgrounds to choose from, more than any other program we reviewed, but it’s not convincing visually.

Another problem with Seven Seas Deluxe is the movement of the fish. They behave realistically, but when they come close to other fish, they start to jump and jitter around. When this happens, their bodies often go through each other too, ruining the believability of the program.

Overall, the program is a lot of fun to customize, and if the fish and the scenery were improved a little, Aquazone Seven Sea Deluxe could easily make it into our top three.

Aquazone Seven Seas Deluxe Screenshots

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Ease of Use:

Seven Seas Deluxe has an easy menu that lets you feed the fish, change the settings and “tap on the glass.” The manufacturer says that the fish will interact with the user when they tap on the glass. Using various speeds of “tapping,” we didn’t find that the fish reacted much at all.

One of the things that we really liked about the Seven Seas Deluxe menu is the dedicated button for switching between windowed and fullscreen modes. Many other programs have this option, but it’s buried in submenus.

Feature Set:

Seven Seas Deluxe has a lot of fish and backgrounds choices. There are 40 species of fish and 21 different types of scenery, more than any other program we reviewed.

Additionally, Aquazone Seven Seas Deluxe, along with Aquazone Desktop Garden, are the only programs to offer both freshwater and saltwater fish and can accommodate an unlimited number of fish in each tank. The program will not allow freshwater fish in a saltwater tank or vice versa. While this is completely logical, it may frustrate some who want more control in mixing species in one tank.

The menu on Seven Seas Deluxe is fairly simple; although, the various options for lighting and sound aren’t clearly labeled in some cases.

Ease of Installation:

Installation for Seven Seas Deluxe was quick and easy.

Help/Support:

Smith Micro Software offers several different support resources, and it’s the only company to offer a phone line for questions. It also has manuals, FAQs, updates and email support.

Fish:

Seven Seas Deluxe has a great selection of fish that includes larger ocean fish, like sharks, sunfish, coelacanths and jellyfish. Many of the smaller reef fish are included along with goldfish and a few other freshwater fish. The fish look fairly realistic, but they are not as life-like as the top three programs on our list. Additionally, the movements of the fish are occasionally awkward and unnatural, like spinning around their noses.

Scenery:

The scenery in Seven Seas Deluxe is functional, and many of the freshwater tanks are quite vivid and interesting. But overall, the scenery leaves something to be desired, especially in the bigger ocean tanks. And even though there is a large selection of tanks, some of them simply have a solid background with a color gradient.

Summary:

Aquazone Seven Seas Deluxe is a fun program with a lot of selection, but it’s lacking some refinement in visuals and fish interactions.