Rankings and Files

Online Topics
1. The X-Files (with Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny)
2. Why Nine Inch Nails rules
3. Courtney Love...still
4. What's wrong with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager
5. Why Keanu Reeves does or does not suck

Videogames
1. Virtua Fighter Remix Stunningly retooled figures let you see the anatomy of a brawl.
2. Mortal Kombat 3 The MK craze begins anew with a home version of the arcade hit.
3. Ridge Racer Right now, the best racing game on any system, plus you can sub your fave audio CD for the music soundtrack.
4. Killer Instinct Characters slash and wallop with surprising smoothness and speed.
5. Jumping Flash How novel: a first-person perspective game without guts, guns, or gore.

America Online Pinups
1. Cindy Margolis On her, swimsuits are always in style.
2. Alicia Silverstone Fans have a crush on the Clueless star.
3. Elizabeth Berkley Downloaders lap up the actress' scenes from Showgirls.
4. Chris O'Donnell He's a wonder in shots from Batman Forever.
5. Tiffani-Amber Thiessen The Beverly Hills vixen's downloads total fewer than 90,210, but she makes the grade.

Hardware
1. Virtual Boy With this Nintendo device, you literally have to see the eye-popping 3-D graphics to believe them.
2. Sony PlayStation The most compact videogame console to date packs a bigger punch than its fellow 32-bit competitors.
3. EasyPhoto Reader Turning snapshots into screensavers is, well, a snap with this scanner and software from Storm Software.
4. Clear-Plastic Game Boy Nintendo's transparent doohickey is a great conversation starter for those long commutes home.
5. Aura Interactor Strap on this vest from Aura Systems, and you can actually feel the kicks and punches as you play games such as Mortal Kombat 3.

Chat Rooms
1. Fox TV Chat Room If you want to discuss the finer points of Melrose, 90210, The X-Files, and The Simpsons, why not go right to the source?
2. Cyber-Note Fans and musicians talk about you-know-what. If you get logy, step into the coffeehouse next door.
3. The Undernet IRC Network A great place to hang and watch randy high school and college students pretend to be older than they are, flame randomly, and desperately try to pick one another up.
4. Celebrity Circle Every weekday, the Good Olds Guys sponsor this celeb conference, offering such folks as Sandra Bullock.
5. The IRC Gallery Not quite a chat room, but a place where you can scope pics of folks you've met on #NetSex. Question is, do you really want to know?

Websites
1. House of Blues (houseofblues.com) The restaurant chain's self-promotion is easy to swallow on this site, since it's sprinkled with some enlightening info — including bios of classic artists.
2. Internet Underground Music Archive A kind of clearinghouse for the music industry, IUMA includes a list of more than 500 indie bands and links to record labels and music mags on the Web.
3. The Mysterious Homepage This ambitious Danish website lists links to electronic text archives (including stories by Arthur Conan Doyle), online mystery magazines, and, of course, the Nancy Drew Home Page.
4. The Official Anti-Microsoft Homepage You lined up for Windows 95; now you can share your digital pain.
5. ESPNET SportsZone Summaries of the day's sports news, magazine-style profiles and just a few mentions of its sponsor, cable network ESPN.

Oddities
1. I Just Want to Be Friends Anyone who's ever heard these heartbreaking words can add interactive insult to injury by E-mailing this web page's wisecracking, but sympathetic, proprietor.
2. Wild, Weird & Wacky (MPI Multimedia) Teeming with some truly inexplicable videos (''Eating Pickled Eggs,'' ''Bavarian Finger-Pull''), this CD-ROM lies somewhere between reality and Ed Wood.
3. Space Age Bachelor Pad Music Denizens of the Nouveau Cocktail Nation swing through this parallel world ruled by smoking jackets and horn-rimmed glasses.
4. The InterNet Farrah Forke Fan Club Everything you ever wanted to know about the costar of Dweebs.
5. Anagram Insanity Plug in a name, get an endless list of amusing, suggestive, or bizarre reworkings. How else would you know that Robert Packwood could be anagrammed into abort crowd poke?

CD-ROMS
1. Phantasmagoria (Sierra On-Line) If you find Myst too tame, try this — a seven-disc interactive ode to B-movie horror.
2. Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time (7th Level) More than old video clips from the Brit comedy troupe's BBC series, these anarchic parodies prove they can get a laugh in any medium.
3. Corel All-Movie Guide (Corel Corp.) Nothing on TV tonight? Take a gander at these 90,000 movie and video reviews.
4. The Viking Opera Guide (Attica Cybernetics) With this disc's graphics, authoritative text, and music samples, even Homer Simpson might come to appreciate screeching divas.
5. Endorfun (Time Warner Interactive) A cross between Tetris and Rubik's Cube, tinged with psilocybin and one-worldliness.