Can you help Fred, Velma, and the gang solve the mystery behind the Phantom Knight and his dragon? Scooby-Doo: Phantom of the Knight offers laughs, pretty good animation, and a series of challenging puzzles to entertain young children for hours. Since the villain and clues change with each new adventure, replay is just as much fun as the very first game. Set up much like an episode of the classic television series, the program puts players in an old, castle-themed amusement park to explore for clues to its haunting. Some of the scarier areas will require feeding Scooby or Shaggy to coax them in; snacks can be obtained by several tests of skill along the way. Once enough clues have been collected, players decide who's to blame, then check to see if the guess is right in an action sequence that closes play. Three levels of difficulty are available, and each offers increasing pressure in the form of red-herring clues and harder challenges to acquire Scooby Snacks. Installation is very simple, and the CD-ROM comes with several Scooby-related goodies like a printable poster and online previews of upcoming movies. (Ages 5 to 10) -Rob Lightner.

There's trouble in Townsville in Powerpuff Girls-Mojo Jojo's Clone Zone for the PC and Mac. Mojo Jojo has devised a terrible plan: he has successfully created Robot clones of himself that contain knowledge from his own brain, and he has sent them into the streets and to the Underground in Townsville, in order to destroy it. The clones, however, are capable of being overthrown: help the Power Puff girls to capture and defeat the clones by using learning power to unlock rewards by completing activities and collecting the clones' memory chips, and so, ultimately saving Townsville from Mojo Jojo's evil and villainous plans. You may well be wondering who the Powerpuff Girls are? Red-haired Blossom is the leader, and always wears pink dresses. Buttercup, with short black hair, wears green clothes and is really tough, while Bubbles, the most sensitive of the trio, wears blue dresses and has blonde bunches. All were created by Professor Utonium and all have special skills and incredible super powers, courtesy of their creator, which they regularly use to save the world from danger. By playing these games, your children will develop their maths and reading skills, logic and problem-solving abilities, their critical thinking analysis and sequencing and direction following abilities-all of which are necessary for educational development. The CD-ROM is aimed at children aged 6-10 years, which covers a large range of abilities, but to accommodate this age gap 5 levels of difficulty have been built into the program. Progress is automatically remembered, and can be monitored. There are also print-outs available: choose from 25 activities including cross words, colouring, word searches, and more. [+]

Kids who don't want to leave the Cretaceous period-as depicted in Disney's thundering Dinosaur film-will thrill at this whimsical Activity Centre, created by the same company that made the movie. Graced with snippets of evocative music, animation and voice talent from the film, this CD-ROM has great ambience throughout, whether you are playing simple arcade games or spending long moments picking out a unique tail and roar for your hand-built dinosaur. As you would imagine, much of the film's personality is echoed here. You will see the same moody prehistoric habitats, the same eye-popping dinosaur animation, the same stupid lemur jokes, and the same absence of scientific veracity. If you want a truly educational software program about dinosaurs, you'll have to look elsewhere (try the Magic School Bus Dinosaurs or Dorling Kindersley 3D Dinosaur Hunter CD-ROMs for true facts). With this program, you will instead get loads of imagery, drama and hypnotic games and activities rife with snarling Carnotaurs and Velociraptors. There are five areas to explore in this CD-ROM: one cool puzzle-making activity that allows you to construct a dinosaur all the way down to its exact roar, one neat chess-like strategy game that pits carnivorous dinos against their vegetarian brethren, and three hypnotic games that don't offer much beyond compulsive multilevel arcade play. It's hard to figure out whom the ironic Dating Game-style "Lemur Love Match" is meant to appeal to, yet in all other cases, the games (no matter how basic) are so well stocked with massive, rumbling reptiles that any layman dinosaur fan is going to find them perfectly satisfying. (Ages 5 and older) -Jean Lenihan.

The Dream Wide Web is the environment in which you find yourself: it's a virtual World Wide Web where the Webmaster has their homepage, and it's the game's starting point. One point of note-getting started was somewhat marred by the game's insistence that your computer run in 256 colour mode, a unpromisingly low specification. Despite this the graphics are rather good with something of a "Blade Runner" atmosphere with piles of discarded monitors hiding in the murk, writhing cables and gloomy tunes. Your task is to vanquish the evil Hacker who has subjugated the inhabitants-now to be found living underground as Subterraneans, who can be called upon to help if you post messages on the Newsgroup boards. The Hacker's hench-entities are Getties, a sneaky and vicious bunch who will do anything for a chocolate caramel. Pushing these through the door of your CD-ROM drive is unlikely to help, however. Instead, you must find cards and the card combinations that let you breach the four firewalls (other combinations are antidotes for the viruses that come from the swamp) using the search engine and information centre that are all part of the game. To move around you use a white glove-shaped cursor that lets you push, pull, pick things up and generally navigate. It's a tiny bit like wearing a virtual reality glove, an innovative idea that's easy to learn, helped by on-screen prompts. This is a novel and potentially absorbing game, and if you crack all the firewalls and your telephone bill can stand it, you can choose to play a final online round against the Hacker. [+]

In Jungle Tumble, the first game in Disney's Tarzan, you are asked to help baby Tarzan pack up his tree house. Using the arrows on your keyboard you move the crawling Tarzan up and down the branches and down the ladders. All the time, you have to be on the look out for baby leopards which you can squirt with milk from Tarzan's bottle. This is an easy-to-play game which goes up to three levels so you soon find yourself fending off gorillas or trying to distract them with juicy bananas. At each level, Tarzan gets older so in the final level you find yourself helping Tarzan and Jane knock barrels and boxes into water. In Power Lunch, Tarzan movie characters Terk and Tantor invite you to a jungle feast, which means you have to bounce chameleon balls onto rectangles containing animals. As you bounce into the animal, the ball changes colour and then you have to bounce it into the food that animal eats. For example, the baboon is in a yellow rectangle and the bananas it likes to eat are also yellow. The game gets progressively more demanding. There are 50 levels in all. [+]