Breakwater Crumbling Before the Narrative Flood

Since it looks like most of us are still reeling from the potentially lethal after-effects of E3, there is thus very little new press out there right now – other than the ostensibly amaranthine recaps and bullet point lists – so I thought I would just as well direct our attention to something completely different.

So. I enjoy reading Richard Cobbett. We go way back (…well, he does) as I originally chanced upon his blog, as an impressionable young man, thanks to his very questionable coverage of Sin Episodes. ¹⁾Thank you archive.org! I couldn’t find the original post on his website. He’s cool and stuff and it so happens that he totally agrees with me on Guybrush’s new hair.

To cut to the chase, he has recently débuted an all-new interactive website called Narrative Flood, under the fantastic subtitle “Because Story Matters”; the right words indeed, in the correct order no less. I would like to be so bold as to highlight just a few intriguing topics that have already been tackled on the website, types of themes that I would hope to ultimately discuss here at the Slowdown as well:

• A straightman take on Al Lowe’s often-disrespected but ultimately oft-reminisced and …yes, even beloved Leisure Suit Larry series and Larry’s romantic search for Real Love ™. Cobbett argues, like Lowe himself, that the “packaging … always promised much more sex than was actually in the games” ²⁾http://www.noisetosignal.org/2008/10/the-nts-interview-al-lowe
• Sexy vs. Sexy, a discussion of the dangerous high-wire tap-dance that is the use and abuse of sex appeal in games.
• Arachnophobia vs. Altruism, in which Your Hero laments the monstrous throng of spiders in games. I can’t help but mention I’ve only recently bested my own arachnophobia in video games; For instance – to keep on bringing up Sin any way I can – some years back, I simply could not envision myself playing Wages of Sin, the expansion pack, because the very first enemies in the game so happened to be spiders. I do have to add that I did ultimately conquer most of my fear during my relatively recent play-through of Dark Messiah.

A refreshing new website with a focus I can full well get behind – please do take a look!