E_HELIX'S PROFILE

This is kind of funny, though not ironic. I agree with you, and I believe I got the gist of what you are saying, yet I don't have the patience to read more than a few stanzas of your post.

I get aggravated by 30 minute cutscenes and intros to no end. IMHO, a good game is one that sneaks the story (and in some cases the back-story too) in during gameplay and balances the amount of lengthened cutscenes throughout the game. I've played a few that seemed really well balanced, and then the last quarter of the game was mostly pressing the spacebar to get through dialogue fifteen minutes at a time, interspersed with maybe 5-10 minutes of adventuring in between :P