Quarantine would have been a lot harder without Wi-Fi. Imagine playing Charades in Morse code, or sending your buddies a messenger pigeon with a tic-tac-toe table. Fortunately, we have better options these days and a vast variety of them too. Below is a list of 23 games that you can play online. They are split into categories so it’s easier to find the kind of game you’re looking for.
Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda has the captivating ability to leave audiences wanting more. It was only normal then, after watching Shoplifters on Hulu, I turned to Nobody Knows. But what does this have to do with Totoro?
I cannot believe I am writing about Grand Theft Auto V seven years after it was released. The game’s popularity became very clear when it was available for free in 2020. From May 14 to 21 anyone could claim GTA V for free at the Epic Games Store. The demand was so great, the store was brought offline. In a tweet, the Epic Games Store acknowledged the problems with the site – “slow loading times, 500 errors, or launcher crashing” – and promised a swift solution. The amount of attention this spree attracted brought up the question of how GTA V is still popular.
Leaks. Leaks everywhere. If you’re interested in the details of this scandal, but haven’t read much in order to avoid spoilers, then you’ve come to the right place. This is a spoiler-free compilation of information from several different sites, including Forbes, Polygon, IGN, Screen Rant, and Twitter. There is also a timeline of events created by a member of the ASLC’s Game Committee, Parker Chojonowski, along with a few thoughts about leaks involving popular game franchises.
To some people, Rosemary’s Baby is a timeless, eerie classic that deserves to be shared. To others, it may just be that strange movie that Blair and Dan watched together over the phone in Gossip Girl. To me, it was the movie with the most amount of yellow and perhaps the most unintentional amount of allusion I have ever seen. I read Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s dark short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” in high school, not long before watching Roman Polanski’s cursed movie for the first time. I remember noticing a pattern and then pointing out every single yellow item onscreen. There were so many that I became an unbearable company. Yet the parallels between these two works run much deeper than the shared color.
Early memories of Minecraft sound like a mixture of "Can’t Hold Us" by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, "Blurred Lines" (you know exactly the one), and "Harlem Shake". In 2013, at the height of Minecraft’s popularity, the word “selfie” became part of common vernacular for the first time and was named word of the year by Oxford Dictionary. For many of us college students, those were our middle school days, and it’s probably best to leave those in the past. That’s exactly what happened, according Google Trends. Following Minecraft’s meteoric rise in 2013, it dipped and has been steadily decreasing in web search popularity on Google and YouTube. But seemingly out of nowhere, it’s trending again?
Suzanne Collins, the author of The Hunger Games trilogy, recently announced the release of a new prequel to her hit series. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is expected to reach bookshelves in May 2020. The film series has briefly resurged in popularity following Freeform’s Hunger Games Weekend – a marathon of all four movies which aired April 25th and 26th. Lionsgate also streamed the series for their "Lionsgate Live! A Night at the Movies" fundraising event on April 17th. It’s no secret that The Hunger Games is no longer the buzz-worthy, popular series it was around 2012. In my own experience, bringing it up in casual conversation is a little awkward for everyone involved, but it shouldn’t be. There are a lot of amazing feats that this franchise and its respective books have accomplished. Even if it’s been a few years since it peaked in popularity, there are still reasons to support this series.
Netflix added a forgotten gem to its collection this past May. Audiences vaguely remember The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as the movie where Brad Pitt is born old and dies young. I remember the buzz that this movie generated when it first came out in 2008. Television networks aired it so often that I was able to watch it a few times, though I never quite understood why adults grew so silent and contemplative at the end. I was old enough to understand that many of the characters had passed away, which could explain the silence. But other movies with similar death tolls did not have the same, sullen effect that Benjamin Button had on adults. Upon watching the movie for the first time in my 20s, I finally began to understand why the story leaves audiences in a melancholy, catatonic state, and it has nothing to do with death. On the contrary, it had everything to do with life.
It is no surprise at this point in the Coronavirus pandemic that movie theaters across the country have shut down in response to the crisis. Even at times like these there are silver linings and thankfully, movies will not go unwatched. Instead of screening and – in the case of Trolls World Tour – premiering in movie theaters, many new releases will be available on streaming platforms much earlier than expected. Such is the case with Onward, Frozen II, Emma, The Invisible Man, Bloodshot, and more. Although living rooms are nothing like movie theaters, there are several ways to sit back, relax, and enjoy these early releases from home. If you wish to take this at-home experience a step further, here are a few ways to simulate a classic movie theater while social distancing and flattening the curve.
At a time where everyone is stuck indoors and the prospect of a sunny, beachy summer feels further and further away, a lot of people have found solace in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. There are screenshots all over social media of villagers standing around a paradisiacal island with fruits in the trees and butterflies in the air. Unfortunately, buying the game and its corresponding console is becoming a bigger challenge. Due in part to the smashing success of New Horizons and to coronavirus restrictions in China, the Nintendo Switch is out of stock.
