The nightmare before Christmas? Almost. In Christmas Crisis you need to help out Santa delivering presents by guiding his sleigh and dropping presents over houses, whilst avoiding jets and airplanes. The game is certainly a good idea for the holidays and an original adaptation of the Space Invaders style, yet Christmas Crisis is on the whole rather disappointing.

First of all, and this may sound cheesy, but I quite like when there's a little introduction to the game, or at least some sort of setting. Christmas Crisis drops you right in without any explanation as to why you need to replace Santa. There's only a small window to explain the controls.

Movements in Christmas Crisis are simple. Use your arrow keys to navigate your sleigh and the space bar to shoot the presents onto houses. On the whole though, they feel a bit clunky, and there's a little delay every time you move the sleigh. Christmas Crisis is a bit difficult and I couldn't manage to hit all the houses in the first level. Getting used to it doesn't take much though, but the increase of planes flying around as you pass levels does make it challenging.

Even though the game lacks an introduction, and controls are clunky, Christmas Crisis is an OK time waster for the holidays.

Download Christmas Crisis 1.2.3 in Softonic

If your kids are crayoning all over your furniture and walls then get them switched onto Magic Whiteboard where they can doodle away for hours without causing any damage to house and home.

Drawing is apparently one of the best way for kids to develop their ability to reason and coordinate along with playing with toys and other creative pursuits. Magic Whiteboard is exactly what you'd expect it to be - a whiteboard which kids can use over and over again to paint, draw and doodle with several different colours. However, this is no ordinary whiteboard because it is designed not only for individual use, but also for collective drawing in a home network with up to 5 computers. This makes it ideal for parents or teachers who want to help their kids draw.

In fact, the program allows a remote user to take the character of a cartoon character who helps them draw. This means you can sit in another room and see what your kid is drawing while you help them from a distance. Once the masterpiece is complete, you can output the image in BMP, JPEG, or GIF formats which is rather limited although it's doubtful that anyone who uses this would need any other particular format.

An unusual and innovative whiteboard that can be as much fun for parents as it is for their children.

Download Magic Whiteboard 2.3 in Softonic

The SimCity saga is a classic in the world of videogames. Its attractive mixture of strategy and simulation elements along with a high level of detail has made a real success from it.

SimCity Societies is one of the last representatives of this popular series: a new title that follows the SimCity line, but adding more and more elements from The Sims, the other successful saga created by EA. In a way, we could say the game is now easier to play – something which newcomers will be thankful for – while still keeps the same addictive elements for hardcore SimCity players.

In SimCity Societies you have the possibility to create very different towns, not only in aspect, but also in their values. From creativity to spirituality, from knowledge to production, the values of your city will affect its general design and layout.

Another distinctive feature is the attention paid to your citizens, not just as a crowd of people, but actually caring about their individual needs and feelings. You can click on anyone of them and see how they're doing, where they work and whether they're happy of not.

We also find this incredible level of detail in the game's graphics. You can freely move around with your mouse and use the wheel to zoom up to street level, until you're able to see your citizens' faces. There's also a huge array of objects (homes, workplaces, shop and the like) you can choose from and combine anyway you want. On the downside, this means that you have so much information in the game's interface that it can become really overwhelming for first-time players.

SimCity Societies is, in short, a very entertaining game: the kind of title that you can play for hours without noticing the passing of time. Also, it's a great chance for you to start playing the SimCity saga if you haven't played any of these titles before.

SimCity Societies is the evolution of the original SimCity saga: a strategy building simulator that will get you hooked before you can even notice it.

Download SimCity Societies in Softonic

In Animal Fun House 32 animal categories are available, each one containing many thematic clipart elements. The way they are designed is childish and simple, but very funny and sweet.

They are perfect if you need a cartoon image of an animal to add as a logo in your documents or if you want to play with your younger brother, nephew or son, colouring these cute cubs. The way they are designed in fact leaves plenty of space for colouring them, both using Paint or, after printing, with real colour.

After choosing a category, copy the image file by pressing the sheet icon at the bottom of each drawing, in this way the file is copied in the clipboard and you can paste it in the program you like.

Have fun using these sweet animal icons in your documents and if you feel like going back to the best, carefree years of life, colour them with Photoshop, that’s a good use for it, or even better, print and paint them!

Download Animal Fun House 5.0.1 in Softonic

I remember not so long ago seeing a news story where they portrayed a future where everything in your house would be controlled by a single computer and a few hand claps.

That day still has not come to pass for most of us although this is an interesting attempt to bring it to the masses. MisterHouse is a small interface designed to control all your electro-domestic devices from your PC. The program is designed to manage the use of lights, telephone calls, radios, televisions, calendars, watches, alarms, security cameras and answer machines.

Be warned however that firstly, you'll need some sort of infra-red or wireless devices attached to your equipment to allow it to communicate with MisterHouse. Secondly, this is an immensely complicated program to configure and setup. In fact, if you have little Perl programming experience, you should probably stay well away as it relies on many commands to configure correctly. There is a thorough guide on the developer site but still, it takes some understanding if you're not familiar with Perl.

This is no solution for the masses but if you've got electro-domestic equipment with remote communication built in and are familiar with Perl, you may find it worth a shot.

Download MisterHouse 2.103 in Softonic

Earth3D enables you to have your own personal planetarium at home. Simply copy this tool to your hard drive – no installation required – and be ready to enjoy great views from our planet while sitting right in front of your computer.

The program grabs spatial imagery from NASA, USGS, CIA and other resources and displays them on a simply-designed interface. You can change between different views and locations by using the categorized list on the left side of the interface, while viewing images themselves on the right side. While the virtual trip can be quite fun, bear in mind that this is no Google Earth, so don't expect to be able to see your home from outer space.

Earth3D features some interesting extras such as the ability to capture images or even record a small video while you're moving around the Earth or zooming in and out – just with your mouse. However, there's one big problem that prevented us from giving Earth3D a better score, and that is its incredible slowness when loading pictures.

Earth3D includes a beautiful collection of images from our planet in 3D perspective, but unfortunately takes way too long to display them.

Download Earth3D 1.0.4 in Softonic

Have you ever wanted to sit down and compile your family tree but were daunted by the task? Agelong Tree is a program intended for helping you do just that by storing and displaying information about your relatives and the key events in their lives. With millions of users sharing family information on the internet, tracing your family history has never been easier. Although sites such as Genes Reunited now boast over 90 million users, not everyone wants to share their family information online. Which is where Agelong Tree comes in.

The program works with a spreadsheet style interface and automatically builds the tree as you enter family members. Each box has a “mechanism of events” option which allows you to compile complex biographies, store texts, photos, sounds and even videos of your relatives. You can also export this information statistically and view it in attractive graphical presentations.

An algorithm automatically builds the interconnectedness of the family tree as you enter information about people and hit the save option to compile it. One of the key elements of the program is the event display module which highlights the major moments in a person’s life and displays them in graphical form. There are a number of standard event types such as birth, marriage, house move but you can also create your own event types which can have one or more participants. For example, there are three standard participants in the event of a birth – the newborn, the father and the mother. Along with standard participants you can add to an event an unlimited number of participants with other roles such as a witness, a midwife or even a lover (such as if the baby was conceived outside of the marriage by the milkman or something).

You can also filter your family by criteria. For example, you can select all those who lived in your home town, who were born in the 30s or all those who held certain jobs. This is one of the handiest features of this programme and it’s lacking from websites such as Genes Reunited. It’s quite interesting to be able to filter your family members’ attributes to see which ones you had the most in common with or which showed the most similar characteristics.

The drawback is that obviously, since it’s not online and you are not interconnected with other users, you can only extend your family tree as far as your knowledge goes. You also have to enter each member manually which is terribly time consuming when you are talking about biographies, events in their lives and other details. These factors are already done for you by other users on website based family trees.

Nevertheless, the attractive graphics and ease of use make this an excellent choice for anyone who would rather keep their family history to themselves.

Download Agelong Tree 3.1.1 in Softonic

This is a White House mystery and no it doesn't have anything to do with an intern and a cigar. After they solved the last mystery, Sam and Max are called to the White House to solve a presidential mystery. They must face their worst fears with their usual cynical humor and, in this chapter, get a bit political.

The game operates in classic adventure game style with the mouse controlling everything from simple movements to the slashing and killing of enemies. The dog and rabbit detective characters make this game totally surreal though - it's hard to know whether the developers were on acid when they wrote this or just having a laugh. However, there's no denying that they've emboldened it with some stunning graphics and audio although non English speakers will be disappointed as all the dialogue is in English.

If you can imagine if Roger Rabbit met Cluedo you've got a general impression of what this fun and original game is all about.

Download Sam and Max: Abe Lincoln Must Die! in Softonic

Buying and selling property has become one of the most popular ways to make a lot of money in a relatively short space of time. The closest I've got to getting onto the property ladder was selling my garden shed to a local tramp, but unfortunately he couldn't keep up the repayments. So I decided to try and make some money from the housing market in a virtual environment as it seems a lot safer.

Real E$tate Empire is a strategy game, where, starting with just a caravan, you must wheel and deal your way around the property market. You can haggle over the price of property and make money from rentals before selling on the real estate for a profit. As you build up your portfolio you can buy increasingly grand properties.

The game is simple to understand and to handle but I soon got bored of it as the process of buying and selling becomes quite tedious. Graphically, the game is very simplistic and the sound in the game is pretty annoying. If you're a power-hungry wannabe property tycoon then you should enjoy Real E$tate Empire. If not, you're likely to get bored within a few minutes.

Download Real E$tate Empire in Softonic

Do you often receive e-mails from friends or colleagues with funny stories, jokes, etc. in the body, yet you can't make them out because they've been forwarded 10,000 times, and end up looking like this:
> >> > A young man is wandering, lost, in a
> >> > forest when he comes upon a small house.
> >> Knocking on the door, he is greeted by an
> >> ancient Chinese man with a long grey beard
[...]

It's really difficult to read the joke in this form. Kinda takes the fun out of it! That's why Quote Stripper was created; it does exactly what the name implies - it removes the quoted text markers ('>') from the whole message. Your friends will appreciate it too, when you forward a message without all those annoying angle brackets preceding every line.

Take a look at what this progra features:

• Removes quotes from e-mail messages
• Checks clipboard contents automatically
• Friendly, modern Microsoft Windows GUI
• Can set up a new e-mail containing the stripped text using your default e-mail client

Download Quote Stripper 1.3 in Softonic

ManyCam is a highly flexible webcamera for all occasions. You can add text to your webcam video window with any application.

You can also add cool animations in your video window and display both your local day and date in your video window.

There's also an option to add live CGI graphics like fire and water effects and even make it appear as if it is snowing inside your house. Have more fun with your webcam today!

Download ManyCam 2.0 in Softonic

Not long ago, webcams were mainly used for holding videoconferences over the Internet. Now there's a wide choice of software applications that allow you to make the most of your webcam, ranging from surveillance tools to image-capture utilities and also featuring fun webcam apps like Snap.

The aim behind an application like Snap is, in fact, quite simple: take pictures with your webcam and add effects to them. But beyond that simplicity, Snap stands out for being extremely easy to use and obtaining fun results in no time.

Once installed, launch the program and you'll immediately see the image taken by your webcam. That is, you don't need to configure anything nor go through any setup wizard at all. Snap automatically detects your webcam and offers you all its tools to begin playing around. We say "play" because this is what you're going to do with Snap. Don't expect to create serious, professional photo collages like you would do with other graphic editors. Snap is a fun tool, therefore it's intended to obtain casual photo compositions that you can use to play a joke on a friend, create an original avatar for your favourite IM client or design a custom greeting card.

Snap includes quite a variety of filters to apply to your photos, such as night vision, mirror effect, black and white, sepia or cartoon style. Using them is a cinch: just select a given filter, see what it looks like in the preview window and click on the snap button to capture the image if you like the result. Snapshots are automatically saved in a specified folder, but unfortunately you can't to select their size or format.

Besides filters, Snap also offers a bunch of clipart graphics that you can add to your photos to liven them up, as easy as dragging and dropping them anywhere on the image. You can resize and rotate these graphics simply with your mouse, to make them fit your pictures perfectly.

Although you can use the program just to save customized webcam snapshots, Snap also enables you to share these pictures by uploading them to their own photo hosting service, Snapstrip. Simply turn the sharing option on and enter a valid e-mail address in the program's settings. You'll receive a message with a link to view your photos online and share them with your friends. It's a pity Snap is not compatible with other popular online photo systems, like Flickr. We also missed the possibility to do more with our pictures, like printing them or sending them by e-mail.

All in all, Snap is an incredibly easy-to-use application that can provide hours of fun with just a webcam and some creativity. Give it a try and you won't be disappointed.

Download Snap 1.0 in Softonic

True Poker is the online world's only super-advanced 3-D poker room with audio and image technology that offers the look and feel of a real live poker room. Select your poker face from a wild cast of virtual characters that look, move and react to every hand. Choose from secret agents and gunslingers to sexy cyberbabes - designed to suit your playing style with real-time chat.

This is not video poker. You will be playing online poker at tables with up to ten real people from around the world; you never play against the house! Sharpen up your poker skills in our "play for fun" section; then play to win for real money. More than just hyper-real, True Poker also rates as the safest and best online poker site fortified by a high-level security system and endorsed by the Directorate of Offshore Gaming of Antigua and Barbuda and the Kahnawake Gaming Commission.

Download True Poker 1.0 in Softonic