Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this column are those of the participants and the moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive material afoot. Don't blame me for a short column, just read it again with your hidden schoolgirl outfit on. Don't say we didn't warn you.

1) Ridley Scott should have won.

2) Cameron Crowe and Julia Roberts shouldn't have

3) At least they made up for denying Russell Crowe his deserved Best Actor award for The Insider.

A mixed bag, but it definitely could have been worse.

I'd hope you could fit more than 3 hours in a game before it becomes too tedious, otherwise that design document may need a closer look.

The Zelda series – which I consider adventure games, not RPGs – are the poster children of healthy length through intelligent design. Many of the sequences in Metal Gear Solid saw you use a gameplay mechanic once, then discard it completely. Could you imagine a version of Zelda where you used the Bow once? Or the boomerang? It would probably be 10 hours long and expect the player to be satisfied playing through again and again so they could be assigned new animal names.

Zelda games are extremely elegant in the way they fully exploit an item, having you use it primarily in the area where it's discovered and more sparingly as the game continues. The challenges are rarely repeated and yet the game is upwards of 25 hours long, plus it doesn't feel like the gameplay potential was barely tapped as it did for me after finishing MGS.

I love it when people demonstrate the ability to turn any topic into a system war. I got letters claiming I hated the PS2 because all three examples were from it, and now someone is looking down on the “PS2 maniacs."

Don't be thick. Onimusha was at first destined for the original PlayStation, where I doubt it would have been much longer, and The Bouncer is a fighting game that exchanged the depth of a detailed versus mode for an incredibly shallow story mode. They wouldn't even let us play The Bouncer at E3 2000, and now we know why: they were afraid we'd finish it!

Neo Geo as the best system out there? I didn't know SNK employees read the column... or that they did anything else besides make pachinko machines now. (snicker)

“Cinematic feel” is the great cop-out buzzword of the past few years, a shallow excuse to make games flashier and less interactive in the process. You want true cinematic feel? Go get yourself a copy of Vagrant Story or Conker's Bad Fur Day and witness the professional feel with which the story scenes are written and directed.

They are not merely slick or eye-catching, but they are produced with the same skills that a movie would require. That is the one true aspect games need to learn more about from movies – more efficient storytelling. If these games were becoming shorter because they were learning economy of storytelling from movies, then I would encourage that. But they aren't.

MGS droned on endlessly in certain scenes and only clocked in at 10-12 hours, 9 hours and 50 minutes of which consisted of Sniper Wolf telling you about her childhood before finally dying. Some games are becoming shorter-played and longer-winded, again tipping the balance away from gameplay.

FYI, I got that time for ZOE by asking people who had played the import after hearing reports of it being short.

Then don't play RPGs.

Part of the problem is indeed marketing. I got a letter justifying The Bouncer by saying Final Fight was comparable in length. That's great (if true), but nobody told me Final Fight was about “finding my destiny,” or whatever the first line in those overly pretentious Bouncer commercials is, the ones with the mood lighting and whispering announcer. Final Fight was about beating on thugs with pipes to save a blonde, and it thankfully avoided cloaking that premise in some bullshit story about saving human existence.

And I've actually warmed back up to FFVII over the years for being such a bold attempt, even after initially hating it for falling short. Then again, that may be because dealing with FFVIII's god-awful cast and clunky-as-hell junction system made all that came before it look vastly better in comparison.

Thanks for the kind words, but go back and read Seb's work again and say that line about “more controversial” with a straight face, or the same with Drew and “more sarcastic.” My modest goals as occasional host of this column do not involve eclipsing either of those landmark columnists in either of those areas to be sure. I'd rather not doom myself from the start.

All that neat stuff you mentioned was what everyone was hoping The Bouncer would be but wasn't. Imagine fights that escalated by location, just like in a good kung-fu movie – barren locations that required direct confrontation, stocked warehouses with aisles and places to hide, dangerous conditions like industrial plants or the steel mill at the end of Drunken Master 2.

Or you could execute the same jumping kick 5,000 times.

Power Stone 2 gets the idea somewhat, but the locations are still too small to convey any kind of story. The online prospects for such a game are also great; I can still remember drooling over the possibility of online multiplayer Zelda sword fighting after Miyamoto discussed an online Zelda years ago.

Two times? You either get cheap games or expensive movies. Without exaggerating that number also, it wasn't a sarcastic letter at all!

Closing Comments:

…and before I forget, here's a topic!

We certainly haven't seen increased length in games due to the DVD format, or even seen many developers use it. So what exactly do you want out of the drastic increase in space? Will mediums like Nintendo's 1.5 gigabyte GameCube discs be enough after all? Just how many wacky extras does a ninja need, anyway?

-Ed McGlothlin, trying to decide whether he's officially going to sleep or just taking a night nap