One of my friends came across the unorthodox 3D Mailbox recently, and felt it was so odd, he had to share it with someone.
He said it was “too frightening” to try. However, unable to resist the siren call of representing all my e-mail as bikini-clad babes, I’ve downloaded it to see if it’s worth using.
The good:
- It’s a creative idea. The ability to represent e-mail as a scantily-clad member of the opposite sex is a great hook (you can specify male, female, or mix).
- They’re developing other “levels”, which will hopefully add variety and maintain interest. The next one is Los Angeles Airport, where the e-mails are represented by jets.
The bad:
- Why can’t we move the camera freely? The camera locations are preset, and there are two levels of zoom. While this should be sufficient for usage, it’s annoying.
- Their webpage claims “With over 60 camera angles, music and sound effects, you’ll never be bored!”, but I suspect it’ll get old fairly quickly.
- Getting more levels and no watermarks on outgoing mail costs $30.
The ugly:
- The program seems to eat up an awful lot of computer processor for the level of complexity of the graphics.
- It can’t possibly be true that 40 people worked on this.
At first, I was a bit surprised at how much vitriol the program’s received (for example, here, here, here, and here). But now I understand. It’s not that good. And if I ever want to look at computer generated chicks in bathing suits, I can pretty much roll my own if necessary.
But have you gotten any spam yet? I thought that was the highlight – feeding the fat guys to the sharks? Can you feed the beautiful people to the sharks too?
I get a fair bit of spam now, due to foolishly linking an e-mail address (now since removed).
Only spam can be fed to the sharks. It’s not as fun as it sounds. It’s interesting that there were no fat women.
The best you can do with the beautiful people is put them in a trash alley to be deleted.