Paul Bray: The seedy side of CD giving

What do you give the man, woman or brat who has everything? Another CD-Rom, of course. So here are our tips for perfect prezzies this festive season:

Politicians are so popular that Redshift 3 is a sure-fire hit. You are cast as Tony Blur, the fast-moving Labour leader whose party must shift to the right yet again in order to capture the voting floater - I mean, the floating voter. Similar political shenanigans are played out in Hokus Pokus Pink and The New Way Things Work.

For the animal-lover, hot on the heelz of Hedz comz Tailz, which takez the unused bitz of animalz discarded when playing Catz and Dogz and turnz them into monsterz. If these become infested with parasitz, The Full Wormage will soon flush them out.

Armchair gardeners will love the movie-style whodunnit Black Dahlia, starring Dennis Hopper. A hacker has nobbled the Met Office's supercomputer, which failed to forecast the first hard frost of the autumn, and millions of tender perennials have been ruined. Dennis must solve the mystery before the new supercomputer is running smoothly (not as easy as it sounds, actually - this could take months).

Everyone likes a practical joke and Bananas in Pyjamas has 1,001 hilarious suggestions for places to secrete soft fruit, in order to cause the maximum embarrassment and the minimum amount of cleaning up.

Talking of medicine, 'Art Attack is a worthy sequel to Theme 'Ospital, set in the casualty department of a run-down East End infirmary. Another game, Dead or Alive, simulates the ability of trainee doctors to make snap medical decisions after a weekend without sleep.

Too many video games encourage gender stereotyping, so we are pleased to recommend Barbie Nail Designer for the girl who loves DIY.

If your little princess gets bored with designing nails, why not buy her the rest of the series - Screw Designer, Rawplug Designer and the double-CD set Nut and Bolt Designer?

And if you don't like your male offspring playing gory shoot 'em ups, what better than Flight Combat Simulator? Based on the history of the Italian army, its object is to flee from battle as fast as possible without getting your white feathers dirty.

There's strife of a different kind in Combat: Freespace. When Windows 99 finally ships, horrified users find it takes up 950Mb of disk space.

You are cast as a network manager, desperately juggling resources and pining for the days of the twin-floppy Amstrad.

We may have to wait until next Christmas for millennium bug classics such as The Day That Time Stood Still and I Went Out On Friday Night And I Came Back On Tuesday Morning. But there is a foretaste in Civilisation: Call to Power, which casts the intrepid player as the boss of the National Grid, struggling to power the nation with an old bike dynamo and a kerosene lamp.

Paul Bray is a freelance IT journalist.