October 14, 1999

LIBRARY / RECENT RELEASES

Where the Wildebeest Roam, on CD-ROM

NATURE: VIRTUAL SERENGETI
(Grolier Interactive; $29.99; Windows 95 and 98, and Macintosh; for ages 9 and older.)

By LES LINE

Serengeti: a magical name that is synonymous with primeval Africa and evokes indelible images of one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on Earth -- unless, of course, you never watch the nature programs on television. The word springs from the Masai language and means ""an extended place."" The world-famous Serengeti National Park in Tanzania covers 5,700 square miles of grassy plains that are broken here and there by granite islands called kopjes, savannahs that are lightly cloaked with thorn trees, saline lakes where flamingos feed on minute organisms and other habitats, all with their own unique animal populations.



CBS

But like Yellowstone in North America, the park is incomplete. The whole Serengeti ecosystem, as defined by the migration route of a million ox-like antelopes called wildebeests (gnus to crossword puzzle fans), is the size of the country of Kuwait and extends into the Masai Mara Game Reserve just across the Kenyan border.

It seems odd, then, that Nature: Virtual Serengeti, a CD-ROM spinoff from the PBS television program, never sets foot in Tanzania. All its action takes place in Kenya, much of it at sites far beyond the Serengeti, like Lake Nakuru. And while some of the five dozen video clips are truly exciting -- I'm thinking in particular of 35 seconds that show a cheetah running down a Thomson's gazelle or a scene of crocodiles tearing into a hapless zebra -- they largely fail to convey the vastness of the Serengeti, the role of the animals in their respective habitats and especially the struggles of the dry season. That is when immense wildebeest herds, trailed by predatory lions, cheetahs and African wild dogs and scavenging hyenas, trek north to find green pastures beyond the park boundary. Some of the videos, in fact, add little more than still photographs in glossy picture books.

Perhaps I'm expecting too much from a program billed as ""the first photo safari for kids."" Certainly I'm spoiled by having actually seen a broad representation of African wildlife in the lesser-known parks of South Africa's KwaZulu/Natal province. But after spending several hours with Virtual Serengeti -- and a lot of it was fun, I admit -- I came away feeling that the producers had missed the chance to convey the Serengeti's big picture to young naturalists.

Moreover, it took considerable effort to join Nature's host, George Page, and an elusive Serengeti field scientist, Dr. Elgin Carp, at Camp Mara, first stop on the electronic safari. Virtual Serengeti would not run on my high-end Pentium II computer, apparently because the Quick Time movie viewer that it installed on the hard drive was incompatible with an existing version from another CD-ROM program. I spent an hour on the phone with a willing help-line technician at Grolier Interactive, the publisher, but succeeded only in disabling another much-used program that needed Quick Time.

So I moved upstairs to my wife's low-end computer, where Virtual Serengeti and Quick Time were easily installed, and I was promptly told to change the display settings. That done, I reinserted the CD.

An elephant trumpeted into view, Mr. Page read a letter to Dr. Carp about the big research and filmmaking project in which I was about to participate, my passport was stamped, and I was flown to the first of six study sites. In the process, Mr. Page's voice-over breezed through instructions for using the mouse to explore the area, find hidden animals and fill in a journal with my discoveries.

Whoa, George! Where's the manual? There isn't one. Where's the Help button? None in sight. In addition to the video screen, there are five objects on the desktop: a compass that brings up a 3-D map of the present site, a journal, a video camera, a field guide and your passport. If you stumble around and eventually open the field guide, you will find help -- but there is no way to print out the pages for reference.

Once you are comfortable with the controls, however, the Virtual Safari interface is nifty. On the map of Camp Mara, for example, there is a red ring where the airplane is parked. Several more rings are spaced along the track to your tent. As you progress along the trail, each ring or ""node"" turns red, offering a 360-degree, three-dimensional photograph of your surroundings -- and by holding down the left mouse button, you can search for animals while turning in a complete circle. You are able to zoom into the picture, look up at the sky or look down toward your feet. If there is an animal nearby, you will hear its sounds -- the grunting of a warthog, the roar of a lion -- and the cursor will turn into a box. A mouse click will open a video -- some of them are as short as five seconds -- with a brief caption, like ""The caracal can jump up and snatch a bird right out of the air.""

And when you reach the last ring, your tent, you can push through the flap and move around inside, where there is a laptop computer on the desk ready to connect to the Nature Web site. Neat.

The goal is to shoot videos of all the animals at each campsite and use the images and information you have collected to complete Dr. Carp's studies about animal fashion (the leopard's spots or zebra's stripes, for example), body parts (an elephant's trunk) and other topics. But you are on your own. The scientist keeps leaving E-mail messages saying that he is unable to join you for one reason or another.

Ready to move on to a new place? Hop in the Land Rover or the cockpit of your plane, pull up a map of southern Kenya and choose your destination. The reward for finishing the studies is a hot-air balloon ride over the Masai Mara. I didn't get that far on my first trip, but I'll be back.

As George Page says, ""Safari enjema,"" which is Masai for ""have a good safari.""




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