Planet Quest 4.0

The Planet Quest application’s aim is to take you out of your office or home and take you through a journey through the vastness of space. Planet Quest, a screensaver, displays the artistic view of the developers behind the application. This Windows screensaver is the developer’s artistic vision of the countless planets beyond our own solar system.

During your Planet Quest-guided journey, you will see a lot of things. You will see planets, asteroids, glowing stars, cloud-shrouded planets, and rings of cosmic debris. The graphics are not exactly mind-blowing, but they are good enough to keep you looking at the screen. If you see something you like, you can press S and take a screenshot. Or you can press W and that image will be turned into your desktop wallpaper.

There are a few other keyboard shortcuts you should know about. Press P and the screensaver will pause, press M to mute the music, or press the Space bar to create a new scene. This reminds me about another application created by the same developer: Cosmic Scenes. This application creates random cosmic scenes and uses them as your desktop wallpaper.

I mentioned above that you can mute the music by pressing M. By default, Planet Quest plays “Planet Quest”, an original composition by Stuart Bassett. From the configuration pane you can instruct Planet Quest to not play music, to play one of your tracks, or play a playlist (with your default music player).

Before you go get Planet Quest and put it to the test, take a look at the following technical details:
Download – the download weighs in at some 1.5MB.
Installation – at the time of writing this and according to the developer, Planet Quest provides support for Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, and Vista. During the installation process you are asked if you want to put desktop shortcuts on the screen; this will put a Configuration and a Run shortcut on the screen.
Limitations – the trial version displays a logo overlay.

Pros

• Lightweight download
• Nice imagery
• Generates random images at specific intervals of time, or when the user presses the Space bar
• Plays music in the background
• Customization options
• The trial version is not time limited

Cons

• None that I could think of

Additional details about Planet Quest are available here.

Planet Quest has been reviewed by George Norman on 05 Oct 2010. Based on the user interface, features and complexity, Findmysoft has rated Planet Quest 3 out of 5 stars, naming it Very Good