Aquazone Open Water Screen Saver

Aquazone Open Water (Screensaver)

This website was last updated on: March 13, 2008 by Daniel Wright

This site is about the Open Water Screen Saver, known in Japanese as Aquazone Open Water and in English as Aquazone 2: Open Water -- these are often shortened to (AZOW) for the Japanese Version and (AZOWE) for the English Version.

Rather annoyingly the distributors often refer to the Aquazone 2: Open Water Screen Saver as 'Aquazone 2', I wish they didn't as this confuses some into believing this is a English version of Aquazone 2 Real Aquarium Simulator which it certainly is not.

The original Aquazone 2 (or the updated AZAX), irrespective of which version you purchase is a real aquarium simulator, the fish are all individuals that need to be cared for, they grow old, they get sick, they die (quickly if you don't feed them) and they breed.

Aquazone OW is however nothing more than a screen saver (and a pretty one) if all you want to do is watch the the fish swimming, without thinking about feeding, checking the water pH, or separating pregnant females, then this program could be just for you. Allume say "Open Water offers the latest in life-like 3D technology to take you where you’ve never gone before" well, it's not that good, the fish movement isn't as realistic as other aquarium screen savers (such as Dream Aquarium) but it is more extendable with many more species and environments available.

If you would prefer an aquarium program that offers many of the realistic features found in the original Aquazone, but with high colour 3D graphics, you may want to consider Aquazone AX, the program is only available in Japanese but it's not hard to understand...

No English demo version of Aquazone Open Water has ever been produced, so we either have to buy the full version on the chance that we are going to like it, or download the Japanese demo. Windows 98/ME does not fully support multiple languages so the demo is unfortunately restricted to Windows 2000 and XP users. If your lucky enough to use the later OS's you can try it out, the demo contains all the files from the full version.

Aquazone Open Water is available in many editions, the contents of which are subject to a large amount of repetition, if you study the content lists for the English Versions you will be able to pick a package at a price that's right for you, the Japanese Versions are subject to even more repetition, but as this website is primarily intended for users of the English versions most of the Japanese editions and expansion packs will not be listed.

After you install at least one of the available full versions you can then install any of the expansion packs, the expansions are less repetitive in content but at $13 each most offer poor value for money.

Aquazone Open Water OWO files (the fish files and tank layouts) are fully compatible with both the Japanese and English language versions (having the same file names '_e' is appended to the English versions), so if you own both versions you can exchange the OWO's between the two...

The item names are stored within the OWO files so if you use Japanese OWO's with the English version on an English Language operating system you will notice the names appear to be in gibberish, this is normal and will not do any harm to your game or files.

One important thing to remember is that the installers are not compatible between languages, and by this I mean if you only have the English full version installed you can only install English expansion packs (likewise for the Japanese version) - so if you are intending to buy Japanese expansions you need to install a full Japanese version first.

System Requirements

Windows 2000/XP/Vista
Minimum Pentium 3 1GHz
(Rec. P4 2Ghz or faster)
50 MB HD, 256 MB RAM
DirectX 8.1 or better, 3D
Accelerated Graphics Card
(with at least 64MB of VRAM)

The English language version of
Aquazone Visual Edition will run
in English, and under most other
languages with the exception of
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.