A Video Guide
for Every Film Fan
A Video Guide
Two brand-new CD-ROM-based movie guides announce with some flair that it's time to "Move over, Cinemania!"
Blockbuster Video Guide
This terrific movie guide (from Creative Multimedia) offers over 21,000 reviews, over 5,000 still photos that recall great moments in film, and more than 4,000 biographies and videographies of Hollywood stars. A neat feature: you have the option for monthly electronic updates so your database stays current.
To help you find your way through this ocean of information, the designers have built a great search function that helps you to narrow your searches with the clever use of a broad set of qualifiers, including MPAA ratings, Academy Award winners, and movie genre.
There are extras here, too-a multi-user Movie Trivia Game will challenge even the most serious of moviegoers, well-designed tours through memorable movies offer fascinating insight into the world of film, and you can create (and print) your own movie lists.
Intuitive navigation buttons, a control panel, and a consistent interface make it easy to find your way around, and a clearly marked path back to the main menu is there to rescue you in the unlikely event that you get lost among the stacks. The software installs easily, and the option for a "minimum installation" is sensitive to those who don't want to dedicate 15 MB of disk space to a single application.
An excellent choice for the serious movie buff.
So who is the VideoHound, anyway? He's a pooch trained to search out the most elusive of videos-and he doesn't stop with movies. He covers a dozen different subjects that include fitness and exercise, sports, children's, how-to-about 40,000 more titles than most other CD-ROMs of this kind, for a total of more than 60,000 entries!
You'll find a wealth of information for each of those 60,000 entries, ranging from general facts such as the release year, run time and MPAA ratings, to detailed credits, awards and song titles. You can even find a summary of alternative titles a movie might have been released under in a prior incarnation-a feature that's particularly useful when trying to avoid sheep in wolves' clothing.
You can search 14 different ways: by cast, director, award winners, MPAA ratings-even significant themes. And once you've made your list, you can print it out for your next trip to the video store.
In all, VideoHound (Visible Ink, $$) brings you 5,000 portraits of stars and directors, over 2,000 photos of vintage movie scenes, videographies of over 40,000 stars, and biographical facts on more than 2,000 of the most famous among them. An exclusive collection of sound clips offers an inside view of how the stars feel about themselves and their work.
VideoHound Multimedia is easy to install and conserves disk space. An intuitive interface, easy navigation, and good graphics make this program a winner. Easy and fun for kids to use, too.
Although on the surface, the focus of each of these two titles is essentially the same, the content and interface of each is really quite different. If you're counting database entries, then VideoHound clearly has more information, and it can certainly be sorted thoroughly. On the other hand, if you're looking for quality reviews, the Blockbuster guide may be a better solution, particularly if you aren't interested in self-help or music videos, and if you tend to prefer information served up quickly, succinctly, and in a no-nonsense fashion.
One important note: VideoHound's cartoonish interface is cute-the hound theme winds somewhat relentlessly throughout the interface. But cute can get old fast, so if you are easily annoyed by silly stuff, or over the age of six, selecting the Blockbuster movie guide might be a good idea. But then again, your mileage may vary!
