News :: 15MR: Nautilus 3D Screensaver

Hello all and welcome to another episode of 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Nautilus 3D Screensaver by 3Planesoft—a nice underwater screensaver featuring the fictional Nautilus submarine.

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As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Get ready for an exciting underwater adventure with Nautilus 3D Screensaver. Nautilus is the name of Captain Nemo’s submarine from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. If you read the book, you will be surprised how well the screensaver conveys the atmosphere of enigmatic ocean and its inhabitants.

Submerge yourself into the mysterious world of underwater castles, sunken ships and treasures. This strange looking submarine will take you to the bottom of the ocean where no one before you has been. In the dim, cold, and dark waters of the ocean you start seeing ruins and outlines of some strange buildings. Then you see a sunken ship. Are there any treasures on board? How did it sink? Pirates? Storm? We’ll never know.

Nautilus 3D Screensaver doesn’t just submerge you into the deaths of ocean – it submerges you into your childhood, when reading a book was always an adventure. When you lived through the adventure with the main characters, always wanting to look at the and of the chapter so see how it ended.”

Quick Pros

• High texture quality and effective water refraction lighting nice
• Sounds & music are pretty nice; adds to the ambiance

Quick Cons

• Lack of advanced features such as anti-aliasing
• Areas where ground objects meet ‘jitter’
• Still installed an icon on the desktop when I asked it not to; didn’t put all icons where I wanted them on start button

Expansion

Not a great deal to expand on. This one looks graphically better than other screensavers I’ve reviewed in the past. The textures on the Nautilus are nice and the light refraction from the water ripples add a level of realism. While granted there are nothing else moving in this screensaver, it is still nice indeed. I only wish that I could turn on anti-aliasing on this screensaver without having to resort to using my graphic card’s control panel to do so.

Only visual glitch I kept running into is where every once in a while where two ground objects met, there was a ‘jitter’; While it is hard to see in the video above, it is present. To see it, wait until you can see through the small valley and look at the two ground objects outside the valley.

My only peeve is that even though this installer gives you the choice for desktop icons to be placed or not, and where to install the Start menu icons, it still tosses an icon on the desktop and all the manager icons on the Start menu still default to the root folder.

Final Verdict

It is really nice to look at it, and as long as you aren’t bothered by the little graphical glitch, this screensaver is really nice and I would recommend getting it while its free. As for paying for it, $14.95 is a lot for a screensaver, and especially since there are graphical anomalies; For $14.95, I would expect this to be bug-free or close to, and a few more features than it has.

Posted by BladedThoth on Saturday, February 24, 2007