Find your way to Oz

Okay, if you’re a fan of L. Frank Baum, or a user of Google’s Chrome browser, you may get a kick out of this cool site to promote Disney’s upcoming movie “Oz the Great and Powerful.” It’s basically an HTML5 video game, where you can wander around a travelling circus, explore various tents, take a hot-air balloon ride and, if you get too close to the twister, maybe even find yourself transported to the land of Oz.

Chrome users, go here.

For those of you with some other browser, here is a quick preview to give you a flavor for what you’re missing:

Happy Friday!

Well, as far as I can tell this is only a concept put together to sell the digital track, so you can’t get in there and play it like you could with this game. Still, it’ll be worth a couple minutes to the Downton Abbey fans out there:

Slovene Literature, Geopolitics and Video Games, oh my!

I’ve been on a Slovene literature kick lately, so it seems like as good a time as any for a fun fact on the subject:

Did you know, for example, that Assassin’s Creed, one of the most popular video game franchises in the world, was based on Vladmir Bartol’s novel Alamut ? No? You didn’t? Well, neither did I. But here’s why you should care. The book just happens to be the most widely translated work of Slovenian literature out there, so it’s one of the rare ones you can pull up online, order quickly and read in English. It’s also  a chillingly prescient story that predicted the Al Quaeda terrorist training camps that changed the world on 9/11 (and made games like Assassin's Creed "all the rage"), even though it was written clear back in 1938. Here’s the description from Amazon: 

Alamut takes place in 11th Century Persia, in the fortress of Alamut, where self-proclaimed prophet Hasan ibn Sabbah is setting up his mad but brilliant plan to rule the region with a handful elite fighters who are to become his "living daggers." By creating a virtual paradise at Alamut, filled with beautiful women, lush gardens, wine and hashish, Sabbah is able to convince his young fighters that they can reach paradise if they follow his commands. With parallels to Osama bin Laden, Alamut tells the story of how Sabbah was able to instill fear into the ruling class by creating a small army of devotees who were willing to kill, and be killed, in order to achieve paradise. Believing in the supreme Ismaili motto “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” Sabbah wanted to “experiment” with how far he could manipulate religious devotion for his own political gain through appealing to what he called the stupidity and gullibility of people and their passion for pleasure and selfish desires.

 I’ve got a copy sitting on my shelf, and this is probably the year that I tackle it. You should do the same. Check it out:

Live Deliberately: Play Video Games

One of our inaugural posts last November pointed people to the Great Gatsby video game. In the comments of that post I joked that a “first-person hacker” game a la Crime and Punishment  might be equally engaging, if a little more violent. Not to be outdone, some enterprising minds at USC have suckered the NEA into a $40,000 grant to develop an online video game based on Henry David Thoreau’s contemplative classic, Walden:

“The player will inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods.”

It should be a rip-roaring good time.

-H/T GalleyCat

The 8-bit Fitzgerald

Ever wondered why there’s no Great Gatsby video game? Yeah… me too.

Well, wonder no more. Not only does it exist, it lives in pure, unalloyed 8-bit awesomeness. Click the picture below to play (spacebar starts the game for me.)

Now, you don’t get to mow Myrtle Wilson down in Gatsby’s Rolls Royce, but you do get to sling your lethal hat at butlers, flappers, hobos and more on your journey to find the mysterious West Egg resident. Make sure your sound is turned on, because the music is a riot.

I made it to the Valley of Ashes, but was killed by the giant floating eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg. Anybody make it further?