Each animal element has certain amount of intelligence: the fish not only flock together; they avoid the rocks and they avoid you as you try to swim toward them. The young dolphin chases after the fish but can never quite catch them, and the crabs constantly scamper sideways away from you. The diver also sports some limited AI: you tend to swim toward places of interest such as the rocks and the shipwreck, and quickly glance to the left or the right if you catch the dolphin or the school of fish in your peripheral vision. The effect is realistic enough to make you want to grab the mouse and control diver and make him investigate the wreck further or follow where the crab goes, but as soon as you do, it all disappears and you wind up back at your desktop.

Deep Ocean provides audio elements which, though the vaguely John Tesh-like piano isn’t exactly to my tastes, are on the whole very peaceful and generally well-done. As the soda can strikes the bottom, it generates an impressive, sonorous echo. As you swim along, you can hear the rushing of waves overhead and the whistling of the dolphin. If a jet of bubbles ascends near enough, you can hear their percolating noise as well. All these sounds can be disabled under “screen saver properties.”

The only aspect of the screen saver that doesn’t really fit in is the intoductory soda can. As the screen saver starts, the screen is completely black. Soon a small light dot appears, which turns out to be the can quickly descending toward you from above. If you really were on the bottom of the ocean looking up, you would not see pitch black at all, but rather the sun through the rippling waves of the surface. Perhaps the black overhead is a passing ship, and the can a piece of trash discarded by one of its sailors.

The can: falling...	...falling...	...fallen.

Furthermore, since the water is not really all that deep, the can would not have had nearly so far to fall. Plus, there is a brief moment of unreality as the can descends, when the background shifts from black to blue. During this shift, the can’s shadow is gray… actually lighter than the black surrounding it! The shadow cast by the can is perfectly vertical, though in the rest of the screen saver, the sunlight shines into the water at an angle. Finally, since the rest of the screen saver is so peaceful and pristine, this wanton act of pollution jars. LI may have included it as a way to show off their soft shadow rendering skills, but it appears tacked on from a time when Deep Ocean had actually been meant to take place in the ocean’s depths rather than its shallows.