With Halloween out of the way, it's now officially time to look towards CHRISTMAS!

Stop right there! Let me turn those groans of yours -- those Scroogeish grunts of displeasure -- into smiles and laughter! For this year, how about giving the gift of game with Valve's Steam? OK, so they might not be your smiles nor your laughter, but what feeling of joy is greater than seeing someone's face light up with happiness and the glow of a widescreen TV)?

For $10 to $20 you can give someone a game that will provide hours and hours of pleasure and fun this festive season. Think about how much your son would love you if you gave him an excuse to leave the dinner table early, to play with his new toy? Or if your wife could bus virtual tables, rather than real ones? Perhaps you just want to treat yourself to some brain-scratching, finger-contorting goodness. Any way you want it, the best Christmas presents this year will be video games.

Read on for the five best games currently available on Steam. They're all cheap. They're all fun. They're all a complete steal.

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Time Fcuk might have been better named if the word "time" in its title was swapped for the word "mind". In the game you play the part of a cute little robot-like creature, who is contacted by yourself from 20 minutes in the future. You are told to get into a box, and from there you enter a world of strange puzzle rooms, where there is always a secondary dimension to the room. You can toggle between dimensions, and doing so can change the structure of the room, as well as the objects within it that you can interact with.

While you're busy trying to figure out how to exit each room, "future you" continues to talk to you, and it's creepy. The voice is a little disturbing, but it's what "future you" says that makes things seem weird. He becomes distrustful of you, and talks of being stuck in a room with hundreds of bodies. Like I said, creepy.

The puzzles are challenging and fun to think through, and the game has virtually limitless replay value because it has a level creation mode where anyone can create and submit levels. The game can then generate a virtually limitless number of iterations based on user-submitted levels, which are ranked in order of difficulty. Very clever.

Time Fcuk may well eat up a bunch of your time, and if you're not careful it might just leave you fcuked.

Red Remover is colorful physics puzzle where every part of a level can be moved in some way. The object of the game, as the title would suggest, is to remove all of the red pieces on the board. Light red pieces are easy, because you can click them and they'll disappear. Dark red ones are a bit more tricky: you have to manipulate other pieces to cause them to fall off the screen. That's not all, though: you also have to make sure not to lose any green pieces in the process.

Red Remover offers 45 levels of puzzle fun, with some bonus levels to unlock at the end. The first 10 levels are straightforward enough, because gravity moves in the usual direction. When things fall, they fall down. Later on, pieces each have their own gravity, and they can fly off the screen in any direction. Timing eventually becomes quite important, and you'll need to bump pieces into one another at a precise moment to keep your green guys safe.

Prizma Puzzle is a brain tickler wrapped up in a futuristic landscape of lasers, pyramids, and other random bluish structures. The goal of the game is to get the energy beam to reach from your energy source (starting location) to the pyramid. To do so, you must click on the energy source, then click on squares that are occupied by various types of structures. Most are simply joining structures, which allow you to pass through, but for each square you move, you lose one energy point. If you get to zero without reaching the pyramid, you lose. Luckily, there are energy-boosting dome structures, as well as ones that will allow you to increase your energy limit from 5 to 10.

Each level is a solvable puzzle, it's just a matter of figuring out what path to have your energy take. There's an added bonus by solving each level quickly, so you will benefit by studying the board ahead of time and then quickly executing your plan once you start.

While somewhat repetitive, the slow, puzzle-like gameplay is good for moments where you don't want to be frantically trying to race around or kill zombies, or other anxious video game fodder. Prizma Puzzle may be wrapped up in some fancy looking graphics, but it is a straight-up puzzle game.

Do you like mind-bending puzzle time wasters? If so, I think you're going to like Magneboy. The game play is simple, but the game quickly becomes a thinker. You play the part of Magneboy, and you have the ability to move yourself over gaps of space to steel tiles using your magnetic ability. Some of the other tiles on the board are moveable using your magnetic powers, and still others have effects that change the direction or effect of your magnetism.

The game has a fun, whimsical look and feel, which makes me feel bad for not feeling as calm as the game appears to deserve. But seriously - sometimes the tiles simply won't move the way I want them to. It's frustrating. I mean fun, yes - fun. Frustratingly fun. That's a thing, isn't it? Now it is.

Magneboy: Frustratingly fun.

Little Wheel is a wonderfully-illustrated puzzle game starring a robot in a city where the power is out and everything is broken and needs repairing. The levels are cast in shadow against a slick sunset background that suits the game's collection of machines perfectly. Little Wheel is also one of the only flash games I've played with a soundtrack that didn't drive me nuts after 30 seconds. Sure, the fun, jazzy music does get repetitive, but it's good enough to leave on for a little while. The sound effects are great, too.

A little while is probably all you'll need to beat Little Wheel. It's a pretty game, but the puzzles are a little easier than I'd like. Wanton pointing and clicking can get you through some levels, but it's worth playing each level just to see what the machines do. I wish it were longer and more complex, but Little Wheel looks and sounds better than most of the casual puzzle games out there.

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

Today is a historic day. Not only is it the 65th anniversary of D-Day (and my grandfather, a US Naval Captain was there), It is the 25th anniversary of the greatest puzzle game of all time: Tetris. In honor of Alexey Pajitnov's awesome creation, I've tracked down some awesome ways to play Tetris on your PC or Mac -- for free.

Tetris 1989 (www.tetrisfriends.com) -- Although Tetris might have debuted in June of 1984, most of us were first introduced to this addictive puzzler in 1989 on a green and yellow tinged screen. As the pack-in game with the original Game Boy, Tetris was catapulted to a whole new audience of fans. Although we had Tetris (and Dr. Mario) for our NES, it wasn't until I got a Game Boy for Christmas in 1991 (third grade, baby!) that I really, really became Tetris-obsessed. You can revisit that nostalgia on your web browser in this Flash-based port, provided by Tetrisfriends.com (the official website for the Tetris.com rights holders). The original game music is even included! Tetrisfriends.com has a lot of other variations too, but the best, by far is Tetris 1989.

Quinn (OS X) -- Official variations for Tetris have been available for the Mac throughout Tetris's history, but the best native OS X iteration is Quinn, a tetromino game made specifically for OS X. You can even download special piece styles and backgrounds to make Quinn look more or less retro. Also, don't forget about the neat (if ultimately kludgy) implementation of Tetris included with emacs bundled in OS X.

The Original Tetris (MS-DOS, all 32-bit versions of Windows, including Windows 7) -- Developed a few days after the initial Electronica 60 prototype of the game, the MS-DOS port of the original game still exists, thanks to Vadim Gerasimov, whole helped create the port. His page discussing the development process for Tetris is an interesting read.

Tetrislight (Tetris for Silverlight) -- This is a neat Tetris implmentation using Silverlight rather than Flash. It's fun and the keyboard controls correlate to the old Microsoft Entertainment Pack of yore.

Quadra (Linux) -- There are lots of various Tetris-like games available for various Linux builds (Netris is a fun one), but I like Quadra because of its network support. It was also recently updated. Check out the Google Code page too!

If you've ever played the classic game Pipes, then Colourshift will probably feel pretty familiar to you. In Colourshift you are presented with an invisible grid of squares that may contain various pieces. the idea is to pipe the correct colors from their color source (the colored squares) to their lights (the colored circles) of the same color.

Though the game is conceptually very simple, gameplay can get very complex very quickly. For example, there are times where you'll need to mix different colors into the same circuit to create new colors - for example, blue and red combining to make magenta to light a magenta light.

Making matters worse is that on later levels the concept of wrapping through the edges of the screen and dummy pieces (ones that don't need to be used at all) combine to make solving the puzzle even more confusing.

Colourshift is a nice take on a tried-and-true game concept that you can use to give your brain a little workout.

I absolutely love head-scratching puzzle games, and Minim fits the bill. Gameplay is simple: you match connected molecules by number, making them disappear until you clear the board. The levels themselves are not so simple. Once you make it past the basic learning-the-ropes intro levels, you'll find your rotating the board and resetting the puzzle, trying to find the one move that will unravel the whole thing.

As the game progresses, new twists appear in the game. There are blue connections that let you swap adjacent molecules, addition and subtraction molecules that change the numbers on the board, and other monkey wrenches that generally make the puzzle harder. Minim may require minimal skill to play, but it requires some creativity to beat.

Warm up your brain and your index finger, it's time to click some blocks!

DBlocks 2 is a fun little puzzler where you're tasked with removing colored blocks from the play area in a specified number of clicks..

Arrows on the block indicate which direction they're "aimed," though they only remove other blocks of the same color. In the screenshot, for example, clicking the far right orange block in the bottom row would remove it, the one adjacent, and the one on the far left side.

Though gray blocks can't be removed, gravity still applies: removing blocks from below will cause those above to slide down.

There are plenty of levels in DBlocks 2, so you should have no problem killing whatever Friday productivity you had left. If you're hungry for more, there are plenty of other great Time Wasters in the DLS archives.

Crossblocks is a simple puzzle game. How is it played? Would you believe by crossing out groups of blocks to remove them from the play area?

Each level presents a new configuration of blocks that you've got to fully remove, and a specified number that you must remove at once. The first twenty or so levels were fairly easy to zip through, but they give you a good feel for how the game works.

After that, you'll need to be a bit more awake than I was. Your lines don't have to cover full rows - they just need to be long enough to remove the required number of blocks. Many levels have more than one solution that works, which is always welcome in a Flash puzzle game.

Crossblocks is a non-stressful little thinker to help you unwind for a few minutes.