Multimedia Review ;No World Order

Electronic Arts; $ 29.95; Macintosh, Windows, Philips CD-i Todd Rundgren's "No World Order" offers a startling vision of just how interactive an "interactive" title can be. The innovative user interface designed by Rundgren offers a totally new approach to the listening experience, providing the user an unprecedented degree of control over how the music is played. With this title, Rundgren seeks nothing less than to establish Interactive Music as a separate and viable genre in the business.

It's actually been more than a year since the interactive "No World Order" made its first appearance in a version for the Philips CD-i platform. While CD-i's relatively low market penetration made for marginal sales prospects, the system's superior CD sound quality and Philips' enthusiastic sponsorship of the project made CD-i a logical choice of platform for launching a new genre. Based on the visibility provided by the initial rollout and Rundgren's subsequent concert and demo tour, a deal was cut with Electronic Arts to produce versions for Macintosh (released this June), Windows (due out in October) and 3DO (coming later this year).

Admittedly, the kind of far-reaching control represented by "NWO" isn't for everyone. To quote from the title's introduction, "Standard music CDs are like amusement park cars that run on tracks. "NWO" removes the track; you can drive wherever you want in the park." Many listeners just aren't interested in driving the car; for those, a standard audio CD version is available. But for people itching to get behind the wheel, "NWO" represents a watershed event.

Here's a glimpse of NWO's interactivity: The CD-ROM contains Rundgren's original tracks of digitally recorded music, broken up into a database of almost 1,000 musical snippets called "events." The user can manipulate parameters (called "flavors") that determine how that database is "surfed"-- which events are played and in what order. Available flavors have designations like "Form" (controlling how orthodox or radical the program is allowed to get in dicing the event salad), "Mood" (Bright, Happy, Thoughtful, Sad, Dark), and "Mix" (Thick, Natural, Spacious, Sparse, Karaoke).

In a way, the music in "NWO" is secondary to the breakthrough technology represented by the platform and interface. Rundgren experiments musically with rap and hip-hop sounds, often with, pardon the pun, mixed results. But whether or not the music appeals to the listener, this CD-ROM is worth checking out just to see what kind of control is possible.

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