Mum asked me what I wanted for Christmas so I gave her a list of all the totally fab full-pricers that are far too expensive for me to even consider buying. Being a quite average mum, she's not very good at hiding things so last Saturday after she'd been into town on a 'shopping' trip I sneaked into her room. High and low I searched, through Dad's pile of sweaty socks and Mum's underwear drawer, then inspiration struck!

I dragged the commode across the room and peered over the top of the antique-style cupboard that my mum sticks her jumpers in. Yep, it was there alright, a lurvely W H Smith's placcy bag with what looked like three totally-awesome C64 tapes lurking in the bottom, and I know the High Street branch stocks Crystal Kingdom Dizzy. I grabbed the bag and ran to my room as fast as my legs would take me. Tentatively I examined the bag. Yep definitely three tapes. How I love Christmas!

Then, horror of horrors, I lifted them out of their bag and saw, not the spiffy progs I was expecting, but the totally terrifying sight of educational packages! Fun School 2 has made it to the budgets. Sigh... mothers!

This is aimed at the very young who will probably need some form of supervision. Either that or stupid gits like Veronica who can't spot a genius when they see one. A nasty girly-type teddy bear is the star. The yucky furry thing dances for you if you get a question right, waving at you sweetly if you try to do anything you're not supposed to be doing.

There are eight different games on this tape - that works out at 50p a piece, a darn sight cheaper than, erm, 52p of anyone's money. These include Teddy Count and Find the Mole, both cutesy number recognition games, and Pick a Letter where the by now bored kid has to, you guessed it, pick a letter. The gooeyest thing, though, has got to be the easy-peasy word processor, with Ted as a cursor. You can write anything you like, then get it printed out to stick on the fridge door with large, ladybird-shaped magnets.

Some of the games are a bit simple and some more intelligent (male) children might get bored of the basic graphics. Fun School For The Under 6s seems to be more aimed at getting your sprog into using the keyboard than educating them a great deal. But in these days of hazy sunshine and technology, the sooner you get the little brats started the sooner they can begin playing real games.

Not as much fun as doing finger painting at primary school. Or making mud statues of spiders and leaving them in Veronica Nolan's school bag.

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This tape is in the same vein as the Under Sixes one. Simple maths, recognising letters and words, that sort of thing. But the star of the show is a most fabulous frog. Frogs are one of the best creatures on this earth. They scare mums and girls better than any rat I've ever known. It goes deeper into the teaching side of things as well - you learn about map co-ordinates, money and geometry (by packing a set of rectangles into a big empty rectangle - it's a bit like a sprogs' version of The Krypton Factor). Then there's a Hangman-style game which involves trying to work what word the computer is thinking of by guessing one letter at a time.

Once a kid has got the hang of the control methods you could probably leave them to fend for themselves, as long as they're familiar with loading stuff on the C64.

More illuminating than diving into a bowl of chocolate custard with your eyes closed. In fact much the same as the first one of the batch.

The coders of Fun School obviously assume that when you reach the age of eight you suddenly become much more intelligent than you were two weeks ago. The games on this tape are similar in style to those on the other two, but a whole lot tougher, enough to stretch the brain cells of any self-respecting nine-year old boy (a girl would have to be at least 23 before she could figure some of these puzzles out!).

There are plenty of logic problems that even TMB would have to ponder on [I think not! - TMB]. The trouble is that when you've done them once, then there isn't much you could gain from doing them again.

Much, much more amusing than going on holiday with your maths teacher and finding out that her idea of fun is counting the hairs on her chest.