Winnie the Pooh and the other denizens of the 100 Acre Wood are ideal companions for guiding your baby through his or her first software experience. Their gentle silliness and not particularly linear behavior provide a perfect match for the vagaries of baby reasoning. Babies can help Pooh pull everything from bubbles to birds out of his honey pots. Use spoons to bang out rhythms on pans with Baby Roo. Point to body parts with Piglet. Paint with Eeyore, who glumly uses his tail as a brush ("Green. Like the grass. Except when it's brown. Sigh. "). [+]

Alibaba and the Forty Thieves is a story CD-ROM that tells this very famous tale from the Arabian nights. Scheherazade the new queen manages to stay alive for 1001 nights by telling her husband a tale so exciting and interesting that he has to keep listening to the tale. By the end of the story he has fallen in love with his queen and cannot have her executed. Children can listen to the very good retelling of this story over 12 chapters. There is a useful bookmark function that allows children to return to their place at any time. Children can watch as Alibaba discovers the cave that the 40 thieves are using to store their gold and escapes death as the chief thief tries to seek his revenge. There is a very good glossary function that children can use if they want to have a word explained to them. It is a shame that the text for the story is not shown as well. There is also an option to play three games, which involve children having to move squares to the correct places to form a picture of a treasure chest. They can also try to find the correct combination of keys to open a treasure chest. [+]

This is another excellent product in the Reader Rabbit range, which supports the National Curriculum and is specifically designed to help children progress through each stage of their development, in this instance from 18 months to three years. All the games have been tested by children, parents and teachers, to ensure that the educational content and the make-up of the games is appropriate to this age group, while at the same time guaranteeing that they are effective and fun. The appropriate skills taught and practiced via this CD-ROM include learning the alphabet, counting, learning shapes and colours, memory skills, matching, patterns, mouse control, songs and rhymes, listening to music and sounds, early vocabulary and following directions. It is not necessary to click on the mouse to play the game, as touching the keyboard or a simple swipe on the mouse is sufficient. There are opportunities to print out lots of activities and songs and personalised certificates to support your child's learning. The accessible graphics make the program easy to use and the characters and stories are full of fun. The CD-ROM is also very easy to load-a rewarding experience for adult and child. -Susan Naylor.

The Times English for Ages 7-11 is aimed at Key Stage 2 children providing a wide range of games to cover work done in schools as part of the National Literacy Strategy. Ace Monkey guides children through explanations of, for example, nouns, adverbs, adjectives and so on, and then introduces activities such as filling in the missing words and identifying adverbs to consolidate their understanding. On completion of each activity children can print out a certificate. Children can also visit the fun house where they can play games to consolidate what they have learned in each of the sections. They can shoot the words, navigate their way around a maze looking for nouns or go on Ace's Water Adventure looking for adjectives, verbs etc. There is a guidance section for parents that explains each game clearly and advises how the program is best used with children. Although the graphics in this program are good and a child would find it easy to navigate the different games, the actual content is not really challenging enough for a Key Stage 2 child. Most of the activities cover levels that would be more appropriate for 6-7 year olds. -Amanda York.

The Adventures of Mr Greedy belongs to the same family of products as The Adventures of Little Miss Scatterbrain and The Adventures of Mr Tickle and like them, it's set in the Mr Men village. This time, three of the Mr Men have got a problem-Miss Chatterbox has become shy, Mr Happy has lost his sense of humour and most disturbing of all, Mr Greedy isn't hungry any more. Children of 4-8 years will enjoy joining the other Mr Men as they try and solve these problems in this delightful point-and-click puzzle-based adventure game. It's in three parts. First, you have to help Miss Scatterbrain bake a cake to bring back Mr Greedy's appetite, then you go with Mr Bounce while he finds Coco the parrot who'll cure Miss Chatterbox and finally, track down Mr Tickle, the only one who can put a smile back on Mr Happy's face. To find Mr Tickle, kids need only to navigate round the village and keep their eyes open. Making the cake is a bit more challenging because some of the ingredients (eggs, cream, gherkin, cheese, banana, glue) won't necessarily make a particularly tempting cake-and because Mr Greedy is who he is, you'll need to make more than one cake. Catching Coco is pretty easy-you just have to find him and then grab hold with the mouse. Of the three titles in the series it's probably the least satisfying, but younger kids will enjoy it and as usual, the quality of the animation and characterisation is high. -Rob Beattie.

Capers on Cloud Nine! is an interactive adventure game. Children are asked to help the friendly characters of Reader Rabbit and Sam the Lion, as they set off on their dream ship to investigate exactly why it is raining boots and umbrellas instead of rain. Having arrived at Cloud Nine children can travel to different locations with Reader Rabbit and Sam to help save everyone from the boots and umbrellas. Along the way children can carry out eight fun activities, such as, making moving pictures in the Art Gallery and answering science questions to try and win marbles from the Gumball Machine. These activities help develop a range of language, maths and science skills. Played on auto-adjusting skill levels, which cater for the different abilities of children, you can progress to harder levels. There is also a progress report to show how the child has done on each activity. Younger children may need help to navigate around the different locations, but they could use the practise mode that enables them to just carry out the activities. Children aged between five and seven will enjoy trying to help Ervin the inventor stop the giant throwing machine which is the cause of all the boots and umbrellas arriving on Cloud 9 making Capers on Cloud Nine! a good buy for parents of children this age who enjoy adventure games. -Amanda York.

At first acquaintance, the basic "gaming environment" wherein LEGO Creator's players build their virtual bikes, choppers, cranes and so on, and direct their dinky, cutesy, usually pre-built minifigures, seems a little bit odd and unsettling-even bleak. Bleak enough to confirm the prejudices of parents and others who would consider computerised LEGO a travesty of the hands-on, real-world ethos of the original construction game. However, after a while, the cleverness of this CD ROM comes to the fore. In the virtual LEGO Creator world you don't just build things and then take them apart; you can make them fly at the touch of a button, give them apposite or ludicrous sounds, change their colour with a single mouse-click, even blow them up (flamboyantly) using the special DESTRUCTA bricks. You're then able to pilot your figures and vehicles through the very world you have created, guided by an integral LEGO Creator Wizard-who is a bit like a permanently untiring, mega-brainy parent. All in all then, a rather fine and intelligent toy, albeit not one for the very young, or very active, or very easily dismayed. - Sean Thomas.

Don't let the title Beauty or the Beast fool you-this is a point-and-click adventure game, for children aged 7-11 years, based on the original fairy tale of the handsome prince trapped in the body of a beast by a wizard's spell and the girl whose love frees him. The "or" in the title refers to the game's most original twist, that you can play either as Beauty or the Beast and depending on which character you choose, enjoy an entirely different game, wrapped around the same plot line. The game follows the classic format of the point-and-click adventure. You guide your chosen character round the castle using the mouse, gathering objects such as keys and parchment maps that appear useful (these are popped into your inventory at the top of the screen) and using them to solve puzzles. These are a good mix. Some require dexterity with the mouse (dragging pesky bats off the bucket in the well so it descends properly) while others require problem-solving skills (deciphering the clues on a parchment or finding the right key). You can save the game at any time, get help by clicking on your guide, Horace Finefeather the owl, and review your progress by checking on the map of the castle. Hardened puzzle-game players at the upper end of the target age group may find all this a bit easy, but younger children (or those less addicted to console games) will love it. The graphics are great, the animations very effective and the video-style introductory sequences a reminder of when companies really cared about producing quality multimedia. -Rob Beattie.

Suitable for youngsters aged four to five years old Made up of the bestselling Jump Ahead 2000: Starting Maths, Jump Ahead 2000: Starting Reading and Jump Ahead 2000: Starting School, the Jump Ahead 2000 Starting School Compilation is exceptional value. Updated for the new millennium, the individual CD-ROMs improve upon a tried and tested formula that will not only entertain school starters, but will aid their language and mathematical development and familiarise them with the classroom environment. In Starting School Mr Hopsalot the rabbit introduces your toddler to the classroom, with sing-a-longs, games and other activities to reinforce the basic skills: sorting, sequencing, telling the time, simple sentences and matching pairs are all part of the fun. But the really clever feature is that the software itself adapts to your youngster's difficulty level, so that whether they are streets ahead or taking their time, they will be coaxed along and stretched to do better. And as a special bonus once all the hard work is complete, you can take photographs and store them in an album. In Starting Maths your child can develop maths and logic skills without even knowing. Because he or she will be called upon to help in the preparations for the giant's birthday: there are balloons to be blown up and sorted, ribbons to be measured, dances to be sequenced and guests to be catered for. Basic addition and subtraction are, of course, covered, but in addition there's chance to test sorting, problem solving, differences and similarities and basic logic. Starting Reading is the obvious yet perfect compliment to this selection, concentrating as it does on the linguistic pillars that will be of use throughout the rest of your child's life. Spelling, grammar, rhyming and reading comprehension exercises are all presented as fun activities so that your youngster will be learning without noticing. [+]