Aqua Real Screensaver Review

Of course, you can become very bored when looking at a Windows screen-saver, desktop picture (even if it's custom) or uninteresting spaces.

Well, let me introduce 'Aqua Real Screensaver' by Formosoft. It can be your desktop, screensaver and game all in one. How is this possible you may be asking, how is it possible to have fun with a few fish in a photographed fish tank? Well I'll tell you how, by animation. The fish are always animated, making the screensaver or desktop more engaging and easier on the eyes.

But explain the fun bit, and how it can do all of these incredible things? Well, you have a few options, you can:

Make it your desktop, e.g. you have the fish swimming around in the background, while still being able to work and do everything normally. The icons still appear on the screen as usual except for a bit of white around them.

You have the option of windowing the fish. This creates a little box in the corner of your screen in which you can engage the fish.

The last option is making the fish tank fullscreen, allowing you to fully concentrate on the fish at any one time. This is very engaging and is fun, like a game.

But, how is it a game? You can make it a fun little past-time by simply right clicking on the screen and choosing the little fish-food icon. This will bring up a fish-food box, then by left clicking you can feed the fish!

Included in this neat little bundle is sound. The default option is water splashing or lapping, it was obviously recorded next to a fish tank, that's why it sounds so realistic. But what if you don't want sound while you're working on an important review for SoftwareJudge.com?
Well that's easily fixed by an option to either turn it down or off, or importing custom tracks, so you don't have to listen to boring water noises, you can listen to Linkin Park (woohoo).

No review is complete without commenting on the graphics. The graphics of the fish tank are OK to minimal for my standards (I play top-end games), but are great for a desktop or screensaver, believe me! The default graphics don't include maximum bits depth (which means that the fish don't look as realistic and 3D while turning), but that's easily adjustable in the display options. The resolution is already set to your screens default (for me that's 1024*768), but can get up to 1280*1024.

There are a few options in the control panel of the program, which is pretty standard stuff like 'Screensaver exit on mouse move' and 'hide cursor'. The best thing about the options would be that you can change the scenes of the fish e.g. A fish tank, the sea, a rock pool etc...It's all fun!

The fish tank would be pretty boring with just one color, so they whizzed it up a bit with extra background colors from the rainbow. I can't tell you about all of them because there are over 50, but it's pretty cool because they change every few minutes, making for a colorful screensaver.

And to top it off, of course, you can change the fish! How cool is that? In the demo version you have only 5 options including:

Peppermint Angelfish
Heavybreak Parrotfish
Longfin Bannerfish
Elegant Firefish
South Seas Devil Damsel

As for affordability of the program, it goes for $17.95 and is an OK price for what the program does and includes, as I only got to see some of it with the demo version.

Well done Formosoft, and have fun swimming with the fishes!