EVE - Peter Gabriel / Real World Multimedia

                  Reviewed by Alan Medley

"Multimedia is a wonderful place for investigating art as a
tool-kit and that's the direction I want to see things go. People
can then become part of the creative process in this way. It
doesn't work for some artists, but I'm very comfortable with
having my work deconstructed. I don't have great technique but I
put things together that can become a vehicle for ideas and
emotional content. I believe that in the next few years kids will
develop their own multimedia language - free of barriers of text
and translation - that we will all ultimately adopt. All around
the world, video, music and graphic images are beginning to be
pumped down phone lines and the Internet. We'll be making our own
multimedia archives and personal libraries, grab-bags of things
that have interested or excited us..". Peter Gabriel.

Inspired? Visionary? Cobblers? Who knows? Peter Gabriel created
EVE to find new ways to interact with music and art and to a large
extent he seems to have succeeded. I had not seen EVE's
forerunner, XPLORA 1 so I did not have much idea what to expect,
although I had assumed it was built around PG's music and videos.
His work is usually highly imaginative and technically excellent
so I had high hopes.

Once I loaded the game up I realised that it's not as
revolutionary as I might have expected. It looks pretty much like
a lot of other animated graphic adventures, relying on you
clicking the mouse on parts of a picture to move through the
scenery via various puzzles and into a story. The pictures are
good, and all are accompanied by interesting music or sound
tracks. Apparently there are 120 screens assembled from 22,000
photographs, along with 80 minutes of video and 45 minutes of
music, so there is a lot to see and hear.

The game is built around four worlds. The first is Mud with the
music of 'Come Talk to Me' and the art of Yoyoi Kusama, the second
is The Garden with the music of 'Shaking the Tree' and the art of
Helen Chadwick, the third is Profit with the music of 'In Your
Eyes' and the art of Cathy de Monchaux and the fourth is Paradise
with the music of 'Passion' and the art of Nils-Udo.  There is a
fifth world called Ruin that you apparently should try to avoid on
the way from Profit to Paradise.

The scenes from the first world, Mud, have a lot of mud in them
(yes, really), and images of PG and Yoyoi Kusama with suitcases
are pretty common (no, I have no idea why). You need to move the
cursor over objects and watch for it to change colour from blue to
yellow indicating that something can happen. You have to click on
objects and drag them around. Unfortunately it was never very
clear to me what you needed to drag, and why, but luckily there is
a help system. It is a bit long-winded because you have to click
on the right mouse button and select the help option which gives
you a number. You then have to close the game down and go to a
readme file on the CD to get a hint. Of course, if you are
cleverer than me, you will have printed out the readme file before
you started.


Every now and then you appear to release a sound and an image from
something you touched and, in due course, you come upon the
'Musical Toys'. The Chooser screen contains a number of 'moods'
(background music loops) and 'flyins' (lead instruments or vocals)
which you have collected during the game. You have some buttons
that let you record a musical sequence and, if you wish, to save
the sequence on disk. Connected to this screen is the video screen
which plays the musical sequence you assembled along with some
impressive graphic animation.

During the game you get to see the work of the artists, plus a lot
of talking lonely hearts, psychologists and other academics. The
significance of this rather escaped me, except that somehow it is
all to do with communications (ironic eh?). The CD comes with a
very expensive and artistic looking booklet full of articles by
all the contributors, but I must say I found it difficult to read
because of the weird colours and excessive over-printing.

As usual when I play something like this, I got stuck not too far
in and I fear I have only scratched the surface, but I was pretty
impressed with what I saw and will certainly load it up again. It
is a lavish and highly professional production which must have
cost a fortune to put together. On the sleeve notes Peter Gabriel
says he hopes you will find EVE rich and curious - I think I did.















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