Background music is Copyright © 1996, 1997 by Michael D. Walthius. All Rights Reserved. etatools' Goo is probably unlike anything you have ever seen. Imagine an image that exists in semi-liquid state and you have the tools to easily squeeze, smear, smudge, nudge, grow, shrink, bulge, twirl, spike, etc. this image to any degree you wish. That is just a small part of what Goo will do. You can do this with any file that is .bmp, .tif, .pcd (PhotoCD) or .psd (photoshop). The system requirements are: Windows: Pentium (recommended) or 486DX or better, Windows NT/95, 16- or 24-bit video, 8 MB RAM, 20 MB free hard drive space, CD-ROM drive. Macintosh: Power Macintosh (recommended) or 68040-based Macintosh with FPU, System 7.5, 16- or 24-bit video, 8 MB RAM, 20 MB free hard drive space, CD-ROM drive. The application came on a CD-ROM and installed easily on my 133 MHz Micron with 64MB of RAM. he 60 page manual is in the form of an Adobe Acrobat file. There is no on-line help. One of the properties of Goo is that you lose the Windows 95 toolbar when running it. I found I had to alt-tab out of it to access the manual. This worked OK provided I launched the manual first. Another characteristic is that the Goo CD-ROM has to be in the drive when you launch it. It automatically looks for the CD-ROM and won't launch unless it is in the drive. Fortunately I have 2 CD-ROM drives but I can see how this would quickly become an irritant to someone who only had one. The interface is pure out of this world Kai. If you ever use KPT 2.0, 3.0 or Convolver then you know what I mean. It doesn't look like anything you have ever seen before but it is very powerful, albeit non-precision, once you learn how to use it. he first lesson is easily completed in less than one hour. You take a young boy's face and apply all the various aforementioned effects to it, save each major change as a key frame then produce an animation of the various changes. You can easily preview what the animation will look like before you create it. Saving the movie as full frames uncompressed created a 21 MB .avi file in just a few minutes that played back much too fast. I then set the animation speed button to its slowest position and saved the work as animation again. This time it took longer but was still under 10 minutes. I ended up with an .avi file that was a stunning 240 MB in size. There is nothing in the tutorial that describes this behavior and I think there should be. You can fill up your hard drive in no time with this application if you plan on playing with animations. The speed button has no numbers associated with it so it is completely guess work. nother thing that Goo does is called fusion which is covered in a brief second lesson. This is really nothing more than a rather sophisticated cloning or rubber stamping. Fusion allows you to place a collie's eyes onto a lion or cat eyes on Senator Ted Kennedy. Once again you have no control over brush size or intensity. You can move a cloned area around as if it is on a separate layer but once you do another cloning then the previous layer is inaccessible. are must be exercised when loading images into Goo or else they will be chopped off. I loaded a 6 inch wide 4 inch high image and the right and left ends were cut off. This occurred in both the Goo room and the fusion room. This software is extremely powerful and a great deal of fun to play with. I would be willing to pay at least twice the $50 bucks I paid just to get some precision and control over brush size, effects intensity, layer selection and animation control. Roger A. Moncrief e-mail   All pages copyright © Roger A. Moncrief, Indepth Reviews, 1997 Thanks to Judy Gefter, !LuM! and Charles Blaquiere for their advice and counsel, some I heeded and some I didn't.