Once again we encounter those wildly creative Frenchmen in whose designs form rises like a helium balloon above the American concepts of function. The French-designed program also is beautiful. As I have remarked in the past, the French software designers march to the beat of a different drum, and Discoveries presents the beats of a great many drums, some of them so loud you can scarcely hear the narration. But that, you will find, isn't really important because the narration is superficial and usually is repeated in the text.
Discoveries is very, very big on sound, most of it signifying nothing.
In the sections on the creation of the universe, for instance, there is a lot of eerie space music. Discussions of great battles are accompanied by screaming, yelling and clashing of spears, and screens on the rise of mammals on Earth give rise to disembodied grunts and snarls. All of this is undeniably atmospheric, but if you spend very long at a given screen it can become annoying. The unifying feature of French design, of course, is disunification, at least by the standards of U.S. software design. If you have spent much time with encyclopedic software, you become used to certain general traits.