Ryan Greenberg

The internet has always been a top-notch place to while your time away. During college, I think I was responsible for wasting a couple hundred man hours by telling people about Zookeeper, a popular Flash game. I ended up not playing it very much myself—I wasn’t very good—but a couple friends just couldn’t get enough. Senior year, guys in my dorm would get together for shared bouts of Yahoo’s TextTwist (try to beat our high score of 1,033,310).

I may be walking down the same road now: I don’t have very much time in front of computers, so even if I spent every online moment playing, it wouldn’t add up to much. Here are a couple new sites that I found out about recently.

Nintendo8.com plays on the heartstrings of any child of the 80s. There have been Nintendo emulators around for many years, but this site is the first to integrate a Java emulator with ROMs distributed online. Translation? Click and play hundreds of Nintendo games in your browser. You’ll need to have Java installed, but your browser should be able to help you with that. If you don’t know where to start, check out the top games.

If you’re looking for something less involved, check out Zwok which is a new version of a very old game. It’s like Worms, Artillery, and a dozen others. Move your character, choose your weapon, fire, and see what happens. The twist in this version is that you play in your web browser against people from around the world. Each turn takes about 30 seconds; a complete round might take a few minutes.

Visit at your own risk. If you have any tests or major work coming up in the next several days, do yourself a favor and don’t visit any of these places. I can’t be held responsible if you do.