Reallusion's It's Me is an avatar editor, which may, or may not mean something to you, but either way, in no way does it come close to describing the fun you can have with it. First take a small 3-D model-male or female and spend several enjoyable minutes changing it's appearance. From facial features to wardrobe, there's a look here that's just for you. Trying the default round-faced female, you could pick a stylish Chinese-style high-collared mini-dress with silk slippers from the wardrobe, replace the pigtails with a more avant-garde blonde punk look and add a fetching acid lemon umbrella from the accessories department. So much for looks, what's the model going to do? It's a difficult choice, but in the end a classy catwalk strut won out over hip-hop dancing, with photo-shoot poses, air-guitar playing, tap dancing and a temper tantrum. For final touches a fashion soundtrack was added and a psychedelic flower background before exporting the entire thing as an avi movie-you can also export animated gifs suitable for use on a web page and a variety of other formats. The fun really starts when you customise the models using a still picture portrait of yourself, or better still, someone else. Using the facial editor you wrap your face pic around a wireframe head matching up the mouth, eyes, nose and other facial features. The purpose of It's Me is clearly to subject those closest to you-family, friends and work colleagues to utter ridicule. It could obviously work equally well with celebs, and politicians. [+]

Be prepared to watch your own living pets wither in the face of Dogz. The real thing can't stand a chance against this litter of ever-frolicsome puppy dogs (and one pig, natch) that willingly allow themselves to be dressed up in little Santa suits and transported to a northern snow scene to go sledging. (Flesh-and-blood Fido, meanwhile, hasn't received fresh water in days. ) When, oh when will these all-powerful Mindscape folks introduce a little reality, such as the sterile vet clinic, the overcrowded dog run, or the rainy 11 pm walk? Ecstatic wish fulfilment comes in many forms on this CD-ROM. Besides the joyful canine playtime, chock-a-block with props and exotic travel opportunities, there are cool, well-conceived moments in each of the scenes, such as the seeds and bulbs in the flower-garden area that sprout instantly when watered. This is the kind of pure pleasure that kids don't tire of quickly. On my street, the first and second graders have formed a Dogz club that often pre-empts all other kinds of play. Don't say you weren't warned! Rudimentary voice recognition, the big new feature of version 4, succeeds only halfway. It takes time to physically set up, it takes time to learn to speak correctly; then after all that, it just doesn't seem to hold universal appeal. Some kids relish playing boss with a megaphone, or Brittany Spears, or whatever it is; others chuck the headsets aside after a few sessions. [+]

Effect 3D is an easy-to-use and effective tool for creating animated 3-D clip art. Often, such applications are little more than a library of pre-composed models providing limited opportunity to adjust a few basic settings, but Effect 3D manages to provide pretty broad creative scope without getting bogged down in technical detail. The key to its success is the interface. The Effect 3D application is a small panel that takes up less than a quarter of your screen. Eight small buttons across the top of the panel take you through each stage of 3-D model selection, adaptation and animation. There's a good selection of base models organised into categories including animals, cartoon characters, computers (there's even a Palm), food, stationery, toys and vehicles. You can add effects to change the surface rendering, so that your object appears to be hewn from wood or brass, or outline sketched, or stippled, or just like the real thing. The next button allows you to further tweak the appearance of object surfaces by using four sliders to control reflectivity. Having selected a background there's yet more opportunity to tweak-this time environment parameters including colours, glows, anti-aliasing, lighting and shadows can be controlled from a sort of uber-panel with six buttons of its own to subdivide the tasks. They saved the most fun bit until last-this is where you get to choose the animation style and make your floppy disk, chicken, Palm or whatever flutter in the wind, backflip, do the twist or make like a cheerleader. [+]