IMSI Multimedia Fusion

Richard Price
1998

Read some of the email that hit our in-box recently regarding this review.

Don't be fooled, IMSI's 1998 release Multimedia Fusion(MMF) — a product which boasts of "Drag and Drop" multimedia authoring and application development - is not new.

It's been around for years in previous incarnations under the names Klik & Play, Corel Click & Create and The Games Factory.

A friend of mine who used to review five new CD-ROMs a week in a national newspaper has all three of the family of old products on his shelves and never bothered to review any of them

If you search the WWW for MMF or its predecessors you'll find many hacker-style sites devoted to games and screen-savers all created using the four MMF family members.

Unfortunately you'll also find many pages describing serious MMF bugs many of which have no workaround and which IMSI isn't bothering to fix.

Essentially MMF produces .exe files or screen savers based on a standard story-board model - but it's not intuitive.

I decided to jump right into the product getting the tutorial to show me what to do without bothering to read the 2 and a half centimetre manual - which looks too "Windowsey" to me and not at all friendly. It seems to assume that any user is already familiar with a number of windows programming concepts.

The tutorial is on the second of the two MMF CD-ROMs and there's a bug right there. The tutorial assumes that you do not have the correct disk in your CD-ROM drive. It doesn't bother to check the drive, it just tells you to load disk 2. You have to manually open and close the CD drive to get it to continue.

Almost at once the tutorial first warned me that I did not have the main application loaded and then crashed. Grrrrreat!

This is a product for hackers, not professionals.

So I loaded MMF first, then restarted the tutorial. It promptly crashed with a fierce Windows error message. BUT . was still there after it terminated. Weird!

I started the Step by Step Tutorial. It's not a tutorial really. It's just a self-running slide show made with MMF itself that keeps on going whether or not the PC-user is working through the example in MMF or not.

The tutorial has standard tape-recorder-like buttons for Play, Pause, and so on, but no indication whether it's currently running or paused or where you are in the tutorial. I became lost very quickly and abandoned my attempt to learn how to use MMF.

Add to this that the tutorial screen is so small that I could not read the text and you'll understand my cynical attitude. If the designers of MMF can't use their own product to make a tutorial, how on earth can it be described as "ideal for computer-based training".

This is a product for experienced Windows freaks who already know what they're on about and with enough intelligence to search for and use information from games nerd WWW sites about buggy software that is NOT just as simple as dragging, dropping, clicking, creating and playing.

I wish the world was really that simple!

www.imsisoft.com

By Richard Price, Editor, EnergyME.com

For information on getting a product reviewed email richard@energyme.com