Aqua Real Screensaver Review

The two things I liked most about the Aqua Real Screensaver were the background images and the color fades. In fact, after using the program for a while, I muted the audio from the bubbles (which got to be kind of annoying), removed all the fish, and was very content to keep my active desktop as a color-shifting aquarium scene.

The fish themselves were colorful, and there seemed to be a good selection to choose from with the full version, but the graphics were a little too sharp for my liking. Many of them looked very digitized. The touching and tickling feature was pretty worthless, I thought . . . it made the fish turn a little bit when clicked . . . big deal.

Being able to feed them sounded like a cute idea, but when I tried it, I found that the animation suffered quite a bit. When a fish got within a body length from the food, all of a sudden it would jump to the position on the screen where it could eat the pellet, like it got tired of swimming and decided to teleport the last couple of inches. Lame. (This could possibly be due to the fact that I was viewing it at a large 1600 x 1200 resolution, but I’ll bet other people are, too.)

The customizable menus were decent and pretty easy to use – no problems there. The online help left something to be desired. I didn’t have the boxed copy, so I had no printed documentation to reference.