Quest for Empire,
A History of the Napoleonic Wars
By David Inglehart, Troubadour Interactive
I work professionally with computers all day long and
when I get home I need to get behind one again for the
Napoleon Series, e-mail and so on. So what I DO NOT like to
do after a long day like that is read about the Napoleonic
Era from a computer screen. I am sure that I am not the only
one who thinks this way in our automated society. That is
why I am always a little skeptic about multimedia CD ROMs
because they usually force you to spend a lot of time behind
a screen clicking buttons and scrolling through endless
pages.
This is NOT the case with David Inglehart's "Quest for
Empire" CD ROM. He has found the exact balance between the
amount of information that needs to be given in order to get
a clear understanding of the Napoleonic Era and the way in
which this information is presented. His work is very good
because it is simple, you don't need to be a computer wiz to
work with it.
One thing that makes me as a certified Macintosh freak
very happy is that Quest for Empire comes on a Win/Mac
hybrid CD. On top of that you do not need a PowerPC or a
Pentium PC with heaps of RAM memory to run it so it is
available for everybody, even people with older Macs or
386/486 PCs.
Like I said above, I find the CD very good because of its
simplicity. You get what you see. David has divided the
Napoleonic Era into 7 sections. Each section consists of a
text that is not too long as in most other cds, several
maps, pictures, narratives etc., all connected by clickable
links.
There's also a timeline of the Era, a battle chronology
section and sections with political and theater maps. On top
of that there are smaller sections with Napoleonic music,
pictures, documents, etc.
There is one thing that I regret. The narratives that
accompany the maps, battle accounts and texts are not
automatically linked to them, you have to manually switch
pages. This can become a problem for people who do not know
the Era very well and they are bound to be confused by this.
My 9 year old son who is a real computer wiz and who already
speaks, reads and understands English (but who does not know
much about the Napoleonic Era) got really confused by this
and soon lost interest. My word of advice to the author is:
"link the narratives to the pages and your work will be even
better."
This is however only a little detail if we look at the
bigger picture, being the entire cd. I can only repeat that
it is very well done, informative yet easy to navigate. It
is perfect to introduce somebody to the Napoleonic Era and
for the more experienced Napoleon buffs among us its a
welcome addition to our collection.
Thumbs up for "Quest for Empire!"
The CD ROM can be purchased at:
Troubadour Interactive
P.O. Box 12
Northfield, MA 01360
(413) 498-2758
trubador@crocker.com
- http://www.trubador.com
Reviewed by Fons
Libert, FINS
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