Review of Fractal Worlds

Introduction

"Fractal Worlds, a visual and musical journey into the strangely beautiful world of chaos." So says the box. Wow-wee! It`s a cool idea. Computer generated visuals with accompanying sound, sounds trippy. Sounds like good fun...

Video

Presented with a 4:3 fullframe transfer, the quality of the video is good. Considering that there are constantly moving and changing images, I couldn`t see any signs of compression or other digital artefacts. If you`ve ever watched demos from the demo scene, you`ll know what some of these graphics look like. Though it has to be said that even these early PC/Amiga demos are still more impressive than what`s on offer here.

Some of the scenes in Fractal Worlds look more effective than others and I did like watching through the different ones on offer (without sound). I almost felt like a moth attracted to the light...

Audio

To paraphrase from the sleeve:

"All the tracks on this DVD have been synthetically composed using specially designed software which analyses the mathematical formulae associated with fractal image generation and produces number sequences which are converted to music. The themes produced vary from meditative to trance-like to remarkable familiar sounds in both classical and modern idioms as well as some exotic jazzy vibes with middle and far eastern feels."

It has Dolby Digital 2.0 and I have to say that the audio is truly dire. It`s old style midi music that just grates on my nerves. There is perhaps just one tune that sounds a little funky, but one tune out of several is not good. Music by numbers clearly doesn`t work in this case. Licensing music with a more ethereal feel, or with environmental sounds might have worked better than this. It might be quite cool to listen to a 5.1 soundmix! Or as suggested on the back of the box, you can elect to play your own music, but not in the same DVD player at the same time.

Features

You get to select from a number of different fractals or can select the dice option which results in random mode. There are two soundtracks that you can select while watching. Add to this the enclosed `visual enhancement spectacles` and information on the sleeve about the this project. That`s your lot!

Conclusion

I love this kind of stuff and still vividly remember playing Time Warner`s `Endorfun` all those years ago. The thing is, Endorfun really worked for me and I was truly entranced by the game. Any chance to replicate the `high` I felt from that is welcome, so Fractal Worlds was intriguing to say the least.

Well, this is an interesting special interest DVD, but unfortunately it didn`t really work for me and I got bored. I remember the craze with fractals all those years ago, zooming into these mathematical images and wondering about chaos theory etcetera. While the images are still stunning by today`s standards, with some truly psychadelic ones here on the DVD, one of the things that doesn`t work is the music. It`s awful so you can`t really watch it with sound on, let alone leave it running in the background. It`s very computer like with plasma style effects and graphics that are mesmerising but this stuff is available for free, you don`t need a DVD to do this.

If the music (or sound. Read my bit about environmental sound...) was funkier rather than early 90s style PC music and the price lower, I might be persuaded to buy into it. It might be good for background entertainment, at the very least it`ll be a talking point at your next cocktail party when conversation dries up.

The enclosed paper `visual enhancement spectacles` polorize the images you see and expand it into your peripheral vision and works well enough, it`s just a shame that the aural and visual experience isn`t really worthy of it.

It`s good of a company to try and do something else different from the norm, but this isn`t something that works, not for me anyway. Stick to the demo scene if you like your advanced graphics and sound as it`s far more rewarding than this and comes for free.