The Hottest Online Disney Games

A brand name as familiar as its characters, Disney is timeless and unrivaled when it comes to tales, cartoons and now its online gamification. It is difficult to imagine 90s childhood without online Disney games. It was one way to make friends with Disney characters and they certainly appeal to the child in you. In short, Disney games are not designed only for children. They have certainly proved to be forever in-demand even without unnecessary blood and gore. It is amazing the way they blend learning and fun without coming off as awfully didactic.

Here are some of the most popular and hottest online Disney games of all times:

Becoming Crafty In Mickey House Clubhouse
Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse and his sweetheart Minnie need no introduction. They have done their bit in entertaining you through cartoons and when they ventured into gaming, nobody had any doubt that the insane duo will rule the world of online Disney games too. Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Online Games are immense fun as well as suitable for any age.

The most sought-after at the moment is Magic Doodle Game, featuring an adorably doodling Mickey. Then comes the riotous Minnie Party and hair-raising adventures of the characters in Dream Spacecraft. 

Sometimes Donald Duck and Pluto also drop by to up the fun-quotient.

Disney’s Toontown Online Game
Disney’s Toontown Online game has everything ranging from bubbly animal characters, sinfully cute clothes, believable action and some of the most remarkable graphics ever. 

Guess what they used as money? Jellybeans! It has never ceased to charm kids and adults alike.

Be your own Alice in unknown Wonderland
Who wouldn’t want to disappear down a rabbit hole to another world full of intriguing objects and even more intriguing characters? Even adults cannot deny fantasizing such an experience once in a while. 

There are over 50 online games for fans of dreamy Alice venturing out and stumbling across unimaginable wonder-worlds. The game will take you to the world of popular characters like White Rabbit, Mad Hatter, Door Mouse and many more. It is so creatively designed and has perfectly captured the bizarre and faraway world of Lewis Carroll's vision. 

Try it once before scoffing it off as 'girly’ because you are bound to change your mind.

Club Penguin - when fun translates to benevolence
Kids are delightfully cheerful little folks who love helping out. And Club Penguin is one online Disney game that enhances this trait. While there are numerous tetchy programs that offer grownups a chance to give back, Disney’s Club Penguin has managed to become the biggest online altruistic effort completely driven by children. Over 200 million kids engage in club penguin games as they earn and buy 'Coins for Change’. They can donate these coins for a cause of their choice.

Rule Your Virtual Magic Kingdom
Virtual Magic Kingdom can rival even those countries voted as the happiest in the world. 

Unveiled as a surprise gift for fans on their 50th anniversary, Disneyland certainly know how to tickle the wildest fantasy of a childlike mind. 

VMK’s popularity led to the launch of several replicating attempts and predictably, they all tanked miserably.

Disney Infinity - A World With Infinite Fun & Learning
Disney Infinity is one of the famous online Disney games, featuring a slew of epic boss battles throughout the capricious playsets. Even though the 'bosses’ are not that hard or confusing enough to figure out, they do pose a reasonable gaming challenge. They have recently updated the game with even more baddies to make battles more engaging.

Summing it up
The world of Disney is infinite. They say no childhood is complete without willingly losing oneself in that miraculously virtual world. Indulging yourself in online Disney games is certainly one way to do that.

About Today's Contributor:
This article was written by Eleventy Traveller Blog writer.

Arrival Review: First-Contact Film Finds New Way To Explore The 'Otherness' Of Aliens

Amy Adams and the weird pods. Paramount Pictures

By Emily Alder, Edinburgh Napier University

Spoiler alert: don’t read on if you don’t want to know what happens

Denis Villeneuve’s alien movie Arrival, which has just reached cinemas, is the latest in a long sci-fi tradition of “first contact” narratives. Twelve seed-like pods appear across the world, causing a global crisis when they hatch, as world leaders argue over what to do about them. Is it better to strike pre-emptively before they destroy civilisation or risk trying to communicate with them in the hope they come in peace?

The challenge for Villeneuve and anyone in this genre is how to portray the “otherness” of these visitors. There’s little that hasn’t been done before, of course, from green men to insectoids to red blobs – frequently thinly disguised versions of invaders from the East. This often goes hand in hand with the America Saves the World narrative, Independence Day (1996) being one of the classic examples.

But if sci-fi has had its fair share of clumsy metaphors, it is hard to depict the truly alien when all stories come from human imagination – and hard to represent them without some reference to the human. As the researcher Sherryl Vint has put it, sci-fi must:

achieve the delicate balance of enough familiarity such that alien can be comprehensible to the human readers, but still incorporate enough alterity in the text such that the alien also pushes us to conceive of the world and ourselves otherwise.

How alien should an alien be?
Edwin Abbott’s 1884 novel Flatland addressed this question of whether the human imagination can escape its own limits to imagine something unimaginably different. Not a conventional sci-fi story, it is about a character in a two-dimensional world whose reality is drastically challenged when he discovers there are three dimensions. Representing aliens is exactly that kind of problem.

Part of the challenge is that efforts to communicate otherness risk losing their effectiveness if they are overplayed. This is one reason sci-fi often doesn’t show the creatures until well into a film – Arrival being no exception.

Some of the most effective narratives avoid representing their aliens as much as possible. In HP Lovecraft tales like The Call of Cthulu (1928), cosmic horrors resist description: they are unspeakable and indescribable – and the imagination must fill in the gaps as best it can. Ridley Scott doesn’t go quite this far in Alien (1979), but understands that his creature is more frightening and convincing in partial glimpses – usually of its dripping jaws – than when shown in its entirety.

In Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s approach is to be careful in the representation of his aliens. The film’s characters barely use that word, tending to refer to them as “they”. The first glimpses suggest squid-like bodies, floating in a low-gravity mist. At first it is not clear whether these are entire bodies or the hands of something more giant – more complete views later in the film suggest something in between. The creatures are dubbed “heptapods” for their seven “feet”, though different feet have different purposes.

The language barrier
I’ve seen far worse representations of alien creatures, but where Arrival becomes really interesting in portraying otherness is in the language of the visitors. Other sci-fi efforts to communicate with aliens have ranged from universal translators like the ones in Star Trek; to the Babel fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; or a common lingua franca like Star Wars’s Basic.

In Arrival, the American authorities call on Louise Banks (Amy Adams), an academic linguistics expert, to come to Montana – mirrored by communication efforts by linguistics experts in other countries around the world. In Montana it becomes clear that unless Louise succeeds, the physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) can’t begin to answer his analytical questions about the creatures.

Their speech, if that’s what it is, consists of clicks and booms that are never deciphered. Understanding them depends on what is visible, particularly the inky circles of their written language. Unlike English words which describe spoken sounds, these circles are ideograms, symbols directly representing ideas or things. And when Louise and Ian observe that their grammar shows no markers of time direction, they begin to speculate that the creatures’ brains may be wired very differently to ours.

We later discover that the written circles are bound up with the creatures’ ability to see into the future, and that as Louise learns their language, she can see into the future, too. Villeneuve makes full use of film’s capacity to flash seamlessly forward and back - we do not at first realise that we are being shown the future instead of the past. It becomes clear that Louise’s life problems are unusually bound up with the Arrival event.

Louise greets the visitors. Paramount Pictures

Debate rages between governments about how to respond to the creatures, amid civil unrest and global tensions, with Russia and China particularly twitchy. Louise argues that the creatures may not know the difference between a weapon and a tool. As another character observes: if you only give someone a hammer, everything becomes a nail.

Ultimately, Arrival is less about communicating with the aliens than with each other – internationally but also individually. Louise’s gradual understanding of what it means to experience time like her alien acquaintances will be central to how she lives her future. The gift for her and the rest of the world is to a glimpse a distinctively different way of being.

The film’s message is that difference is not about body shape or colour but language, culture and ways of thinking. It’s not about erasing that difference but communicating through it. This is what achieves the balance of familiarity and otherness that alien films depend upon – and it’s what makes Arrival one of the more memorable contributions to the genre in recent years. And without entirely giving the ending away, it’s not the Americans that come up with the right way forward, but a more unexpected country.


About Today's Contributor
Emily Alder, Lecturer in Literature and Culture, Edinburgh Napier University

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Factors That Contribute To The Popularity Of The Netflix Series 'House Of Cards'

For those of you who are series addicts or have a certain series that keeps you anticipating what's going to happen next, then you most likely have heard of not watched the Netflix series “house of cards”. The show which is ongoing premiered on the 1st of February, 2013 to rave reviews. It even as a good rating on the review site Rotten Tomatoes which everyone knows is hard to come by. Since its premiere, the show has gained a cult following which has led to its continuous renewal over the years. With the President of the United States said to be a fan of the series, the question then is what makes this series different from every other one out there that causes it to have such popularity?

What The Bourne Films Get Right And Wrong About Amnesia

Not quite an amnesiac: a scene from ‘The Bourne Ultimatum.’ Jasin Boland/Universal Pictures

By Jennifer Talarico, Lafayette College

In 2002’s “The Bourne Identity,” our protagonist wakes up having been shot and plucked, unconscious, from the Mediterranean on to a fishing boat with no memory of who he is or how he got there. From there, the movie franchise follows Jason Bourne as he recovers memories of past events and rediscovers his identity.

But, although Bourne’s amnesia at the start of the first film in the series is profound (and profoundly important to the unfolding story), we quickly learn that there are some things Bourne does remember from his past. For example, how to speak multiple languages, how to drive and how to fight. All of these are complex motor tasks that he learned before he was shot and fell in to the water.

This aspect of Bourne’s amnesia is actually quite accurate. For people with “organic” amnesia (where neurological memory loss is typically due to damage to the medial temporal lobes in the brain), memory for skills and habits is intact, even though other memories are lost. There is truth to the cliché that you never forget how to ride a bicycle.

The Walking Dead: Why That Final Point-Of-View Shot Tells Us Nothing

Fans are not happy with the end of the Walking Dead season finale. AMC

By Kit Messham-Muir, University of Newcastle

Spoilers ahead for the end of The Walking Dead season six.

The very last scene in this week’s episode of The Walking Dead is more than a little harrowing for fans of this zombie apocalypse drama.

Desert Hearts: The 1986 Film About Lesbian Awakening That Gives Carol A Run For Its Money

BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival

By Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, UCL

It’s 1959, and Vivian, an immaculately manicured and tightly controlled English literature professor from Columbia University, is arriving in Reno, Nevada, to stay on her friend Frances’ ranch while waiting for her divorce to come through. Prospective divorcees have to be resident in Nevada for six weeks: long enough for Vivian to fall in love with casino change-girl and artist Cay, a friend of the family. It’s the beginning of an awakening.

This is Desert Hearts, a 1986 film with striking parallels to last year’s hit Carol. First shown 30 years ago at London’s first gay and lesbian film festival, it returned this year to BFI Flare, serving up a heady mix of 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, casinos, cowboys, and lesbians. The success of Carol and the return of Desert Hearts reflects our need for stories that show not only the difficulties, hostility and discrimination faced by lesbians, but also offer up the possibility of honesty and love.

New Book Addresses Question: Joan of Arc, Lesbian or Transgender?

Joan of Arc: Her Trial Transcripts, by Emilia P. Sanguinetti (PRNewsFoto/Little Flower Publishing)

Pope Francis will release this week his long-awaited document on Catholic Church teaching related to the 2014-2015 Bishops' Synod on the Family. 

The pope's document will likely provoke divergent opinions about the contributions that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons can make with regard to the spiritual growth of the Church.

With the publication of Joan of Arc: Her Trial Transcripts, author E.P. Sanguinetti provides readers with a modern English translation which clearly presents evidence that one of the Church's preeminent saints was likely a lesbian and transgender person.

Who Cares About Batman Vs Superman? Wonder Woman Finally Steals The Show

© Warner Brothers

By Amanda Potter, The Open University

Batman Vs Superman: The Dawn of Justice has received a frosty critical reception, to say the least. Despite this, I found myself coming away from the cinema filled with hope. Certainly not for either of the titular characters – who have never been less inspiring. Instead, the future finally seems bright for superwomen. Although Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) is given far less screen time than her male counterparts (and is not even referred to as Wonder Woman), she steals the show when she appears in superhero costume for the finale.

Wonder Woman initially appears as a nameless beautiful woman of mystery, dressed in a succession of slinky backless dresses and gold jewellery – including what could turn out to be her signature bullet-stopping bracelets. Gadot is also known for being Miss Israel, linking her with former beauty pageant winner, Miss World Lynda Carter, who played Wonder Woman in the 1970s television series.

Rather than concentrating on this link, however, interviews have been keen to play up Gadot’s two years' military service as a suitable grounding for a superheroine. Gadot’s Wonder Woman is admired by Ben Affleck’s Batman, but she is not cast as his love interest.

Not-too-subtle clues are given to Wonder Woman’s identity, and they are grounded in the world of Greek mythology. She first appears at a party where villain Lex Luthor is making a speech about Prometheus and Zeus. Her second appearance is in a museum, looking at a (fake) sword used by Alexander the Great to cut the Gordian knot. We learn from a flight attendant that her name is Miss Prince, and she tells Batman that she has avoided the world of men for 100 years, but returns to help in the end. This is a Wonder Woman who likes to go her own way.

Amazon origins
The character of Wonder Woman was originally conceived by US psychologist William Moulton Marston in 1941 for what would become DC Comics. Wonder Woman, known by her alias Diana Prince, is Princess Diana of the Amazons, a tribe of women living on Paradise Island.

According to Greek mythology, the Amazons were warrior women who lived in the Black Sea area, on the edges of the ancient Greek known world. They would take local men as lovers for the purpose of procreation, but would only keep female children.

Unlike Greek women, they hunted and fought battles. In literature and art they are often used to epitomise the opposite of what it meant to be Greek and civilised. Archaeological evidence has been found in the modern Ukraine of women from the sixth to fourth centuries BCE buried with horses and weapons. It is now believed that nomadic Scythian women who lived in the Eurasian Steppes did in fact hunt and fight, leading to the origins of the myth of the Amazons.

Diana Price. © Warner Brothers

In the comics and in the Warner Bros Wonder Woman television series that aired from 1975-1979, starring Lynda Carter, Wonder Woman’s potential as a female superhero is impaired by romance. In the original story, she falls in love with US military intelligence officer Steve Trevor, whose plane crashes on the island, and returns with him to 1940s America, where she helps to fight the Nazis and other criminals. Her romantic relationship with Trevor holds her back.

This positioning in relation to a male hero is also a defining feature of the Amazons from Greek mythology. Although seen as brave warriors, skilled at fighting, they ultimately exist to be defeated, conferring heroic status on the male heroes who kill or pacify them. Heracles (Hercules) takes the belt of Hippolyte, the Queen of the Amazons, as one of his labours. Theseus abducts an Amazon Queen (either Antiope or Hippolyte). Achilles defeats Penthiselea in the Trojan War, falling in love with her at the moment she dies at his hands.

None of this for Wonder Woman. © Warner Brothers

I feared that the latest incarnation of Wonder Woman would be similarly defined in relation to men. But Wonder Woman’s latest incarnation is confident and self-sufficient. In a film where the other female characters, Lois Lane and Martha Kent, are used and cast in the roles of female victims who need to be saved, the appearance of a Wonder Woman who is more than a match for the male superheroes leaves me with hope that finally we will see a female superhero who can live up to her potential. Let’s just hope that the Wonder Woman feature (to be released in 2017) does the same.


About Today's Contributor
Amanda Potter, Visiting Research Fellow, The Open University



This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

From The Revenant To Mad Max: Why We All Love A Story Of Survival

20th Century Fox

By Catherine Redford, University of Oxford

Quickly scan this year’s film award lists and a strong theme emerges: survival. In fact, the three films with the most Oscar nominations are all about survival. There’s The Revenant (with 12 nominations), in which Leonardo DiCaprio fights to survive alone in a fierce environment after enduring a bear attack and being buried alive. Mad Max: Fury Road (with ten nominations) features Tom Hardy as a weird loner in a post-apocalyptic desert, attempting to avoid being used as a “blood bag” by its vampiric inhabitants. Finally, in The Martian (seven nominations), Matt Damon plays an astronaut who, left alone on Mars, must work out how to survive in an utterly uninhabitable environment long enough to be rescued.

All three films, then, depict figures battling to survive in hostile and seemingly hopeless conditions. Whether isolated mentally by the breakdown of society, or physically in the desolate landscapes of the wilderness and Mars, these men are united by an impulse to live on when hope seems lost.

Can The X-Files Survive Today? The Truth Is Out There ...

The X-Files/Channel Five

By James Walters, University of Birmingham

The return of The X-Files to television screens after a 14-year absence was met with justifiable excitement and trepidation. It was an important show, combining Twilight Zone-style fantasy with humour, drama and emotion. The X-Files took its subject matter seriously, and was taken seriously by viewers. Along with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which aired at roughly the same time, it might well be seen as a precursor to titles like True Blood, Heroes, Game of Thrones or the relaunched Doctor Who. The X-Files was a template for shows that take traditionally wild or outlandish narrative themes and approach them with the kind of sincerity more usually found in “quality” television drama.

What Makes A Film Flop?

Cue: tumbleweed. Iwan Gabovitch/flickr, CC BY-SA

By Suman Ghosh, Bath Spa University

Some films succeed, others don’t. Success comes in many forms. Some films are an instant hit from the opening night, some are slower on the uptake while others generate interest only after they have been commended by critics, discerning bloggers or widespread word of mouth.

The producers, director, cast and crew of 2015’s Momentum, which managed to eke out a miserable £46 in its UK opening weekend across the 10 theatres where it was released, could scarcely have feared a worse outcome for their $20 million film about a hi-tech bank robbery.

With a 27% rating from Rotten Tomatoes and searing reviews in the media, its fortunes are unlikely to improve, despite the star appeal of Morgan Freeman.

The Danish Girl: All Skirt And No Substance

Eddie Redmayne stars as Lili Elbe.

By Clare Tebbutt, Nottingham Trent University

It was with some trepidation that I went to watch The Danish Girl. Prior to its release the film had already attracted accusations of transphobia for director Tom Hooper’s decision to cast the cisgender actor Eddie Redmayne in the title role of Lili Elbe, a trans woman.

Lili Elbe was one of a good number of people in interwar Europe who felt the sex they had been assigned at birth was incorrect. How, I wondered, would a film that had arguably opted to undermine Lili’s womanhood in its choice of actor, handle the complexity of sex and gender at this time?

The answer, perhaps predictably, is not very well.

CINEMOOD Presents an Innovative Portable Projector That Creates New Family Experiences, at CES 2016

Size is not always everything...

 Imagine a gadget that can fit in the palm of your hand, creates a widescreen experience and gives parents new, creative ways to spend more time with their kids.

CINEMOOD, an innovative start-up about to launch an Indiegogo campaign, has developed a handheld, mini-projector that embraces the Internet of Things through its cloud connected projector, preloaded with safe and fun kids-friendly content. A simple user interface and collection of smart accessories makes the product fun and usable for all ages.

The Strange Case of ITV’s Jekyll and Hyde

ITV’s Jekyll and Hyde

By Gregory Tate, University of St Andrews

By the final episode of ITV’s adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde, viewers might be forgiven for wondering if there’s any connection between the series and Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella other than the title. Set in 1930s London, the series has found room for plenty of violence, a menagerie of CGI beasts and monsters, an X Files-style secret government organisation, and a demon named Lord Trash.

But the freedom with which writer Charlie Higson has adapted the story is nothing new. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of several late Victorian texts (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the Sherlock Holmes stories) that have been so frequently adapted that the leading characters have taken on lives of their own.

#LGBT - New Songs Make a Positive Statement for Transgender Artist [Video Included]

Rizi Timane -- recording artist, author, actor, and life coach to the transgender community -- has just released three new trans-affirmative singles: "Yeah! It Feels Good to Finally Be Me," "Let's Make Love," and "I'm Beautiful," all of which are available for download from iTunes and at www.rizitimane.com.

Vertigo - A Masterpiece? [1958 Trailer Included]

Vertigo, a 1958 suspense film, was directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Many people believe that this film is Hitchcock's masterpiece.

The movie tells the story of a detective in San Francisco. The detectives name is Scottie who is played by James Stewart. Scottie leaves the police force after a fellow policeman falls and dies while the two were chasing a criminal across rooftops in downtown San Francisco.

Stardust

Based on the Novel Written by Neil Gaiman and directed by Matthew Vaughn, Stardust features a star-studded cast including Claire Danes, Charlie Cox, Sienna Miller, Ricky Gervais, Jason Flemyng, Peter O’Toole, with Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro.  

The Stardust Movie is set in England and goes to la-la-land, another magical world, as the story progresses...

The Da Vinci Code

This movie version of the Dan Brown classic was one of the most controversial and intriguing, and I doubt there is/was/will be someone else out there who would question that.

Before anything else, let us first establish that "The Da Vinci Code" was not an outright attack to Catholic religion conservatives nor was it an entertainment exclusive for those who had completed their Dan Brown (Langdon) series or their Holy Grail collections. The good thing about this film was that anyone could watch and understand it. Oh no, there was nothing cryptic at all with this Ron Howard masterpiece.

The Matrix

It is easy to confuse the concepts of "virtual reality" and a "computerised model of reality (simulation)". The former is a self-contained Universe, replete with its "laws of physics" and "logic". It can bear resemblance to the real world or not. It can be consistent or not. It can interact with the real world or not. In short, it is an arbitrary environment. In contrast, a model of reality must have a direct and strong relationship to the world. It must obey the rules of physics and of logic. The absence of such a relationship renders it meaningless. A flight simulator is not much good in a world without air planes or if it ignores the laws of nature. A technical analysis program is useless without a stock exchange or if its mathematically erroneous.

Yet, the two concepts are often confused because they are both mediated by and reside on computers. The computer is a self-contained (though not closed) Universe. It incorporates the hardware, the data and the instructions for the manipulation of the data (software). It is, therefore, by definition, a virtual reality. It is versatile and can correlate its reality with the world outside. But it can also refrain from doing so. This is the ominous "what if" in artificial intelligence (AI). What if a computer were to refuse to correlate its internal (virtual) reality with the reality of its makers? What if it were to impose its own reality on us and make it the privileged one?
 

What The Cloud Technology Will Mean For The Video Gaming Industry

The Cloud is a new system for video gaming designed to allow for saves and games to be more easily transferred from console to console without use of memory cards and other items. 

This innovation allows gamers to play games by streaming them from a "Cloud" system that stores the individual games. While the games will also be available for download for faster and more stable play, the Cloud itself is always an option with these games.