Mario's Time Machine Deluxe

Mario's Time machine deluxe (Mindscape, CD-ROM for PC/Windows, $49.95) Kind of like Forrest Gump on CD-ROM, Mario's Time Machine Deluxe lets a kid play a role in great historical events. Life is like a box of chocolates when you find Louis Pasteur's laboratory flask and help him save a child-part of a romp to meet 24 history makers, from Shakespeare to Galileo (and the people around them), in a game that wants you to interact with antiquity. Don't feel like interacting? Go to the library screen and click on, say, Abraham Lincoln's spectacles for a concise spiel about the 16th President. As much fun as the game can be, its graphics are incessantly ho-hum, and much of what the producers have the audacity to call music is downright annoying. B- -Harold Goldberg