The Tenuous Link

I have PC Aquarium Deluxe version 3.0, but I noticed in town today that there is now a PC Aquarium Deluxe 4. I looked on the distributers web site, and although the English language site only offers version 3, the German site has version 4.

I paid for and downloaded it. The installer was very broken and I had to randomly click several buttons without any clue what I was asking for! That's probably because my PC is configured for UK language settings, but the installer was designed for German speakers because I'd downloaded it from the German website. An empty fish tank then appeared on my screen, but it wasn't what I expected - it wasn't Aquarium Delux, it was Aqua Garden.

When I looked in the extracted files folder for my download pcaquariumdeluxe-4-win-de\Install\instbin\Software), there are acutally two installers, you can run the setup.exe files directly, and both run perfectly if you choose "English".

One is for PC Aquarium Deluxe 4, and the other is for Aqua Garden. Looks like I got a free aquarium then! My mouse won't work while Aqua Garden is running in full screen mode (beause I run Vista?), so I had to run the configuration (adding fish) in windowed mode. Aqua Garden has very nice tank designs, but the fish seemed to bob up and down a lot, like they weren't feeling very well. There is a review of Aqua Garden here, and I noticed that that site also has a Top 15 for aquarium screen savers.

I downloaded Sim Aquarium demo, the #1 rated aquarium, but although the sea-scape was very impressive, I thought the fish were a bit simple. So my favourite virutal aquarium is still PC Aquarium Deluxe, even though version 4 seems to be almost identical to version 3!