Chucking in a small point here: Crackdown was ridiculously short. ;( I know that something like San Andreas was perhaps ridiculously long, but Crackdown was really really short and I beat it in one sitting. You could argue that, yeah, you can go get all the agility orbs and power up all your abilities, but the game sorta lost its appeal in doing that when there are no crime bosses to take out.

I think the longer the game the better. There is no too long. You pay 50 bucks for a game, you don't WANT the game to end.

It depends on the game. If it's a FPS/Strategy/Fighting game with a lot of unlockables and fun to replay, then yes. But for Linear Rpg's I use to look at the back of the box and think, "What, only 40 hours of gameplay? It's a freaking Rpg." And then I'd get bored of it halfway through. Different story for non-linear Rpg's such as FFTA/Morrowind/Oblivion.

If a game is perfect from strart to finish, I'm happy. When a game boasts 40 hours of play, I get worried. Too many developers are thinking about ways to reach this goal and it's destroying their games. I bet if you cut out filler like cutscenes, backtracking and wandering about, all 40 hour games would last about 10 hours.

Everyone seems to think Devil May Cry 4 is a great game. I liked it alot until I got to play as Dante. Nero was more fun to play as (just accept it) and Dante's a little more complicated, but that would be fine if they gave Dante his own levels. You just make your way through the game just to make your way back again through the same levels with some slightly different paths. It's lazy on Capcom's part and it pisses me off!

Another example: Devil May Cry 1. Rusty. Fucking. Keys! They only exist to lengthen the levels. There's this bit early on in the game where you enter a long corridor, there's a door to your left, but you need a rusty key to open it. So you have to make your way down the corridor, get the key at the end of it and make your way back to the door. Why couldn't they just put the door at the end of the corridor? I know, it's a minor erk, but if you add them all up, you waste over an hour doing this shite.

I like shorter games. I think games have gotten longer and longer all the time. So long in fact that I am kinda reluctant to start playing a game because I know it will take so damn long to play. I much prefer either shorter intensive games or strategy games where it doesn't really matter much if you quit and play another campaign in a couple of months.

I think I like games with levels. Levels that I can stop at preferably. Take now an example Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles that I've had huge amounts of fun with lately. The only lack there is is a proper high score mode, once you've gotten S-ranks there isn't all that much to go for anymore. Or I haven't at least found the place where it saves the amount of headshots you've done and gives you your best 8^)

But obviously I haven't yet got all S-ranks and stuff like that so I have fun shooting zombies because shooting zombies for five minutes and then grab a sandwich is fun. Just like it's fun to play a game of FIFA or NHL and then grab a sandwich. Or play a round of Tetris and then grab a sandwich.

Looking at it I've probably wasted more time in these smaller game than I've had the "epic" ones that only survive for one playthrough, not because they don't have extra stuff that can be discovered but because they take so long to play through that there's just no point in doing it again for some minor difference.

(Of course there are exceptions even to this, but these aren't exactly the longest of games either. RE4 I played through on each difficulty. The same I did with Max Payne 2. Two games that were enjoyable enough to play through even though the actually didn't have any proper extras.)


Speaking of Star Fox 64 there's another thing to remember about that game that made at least me play it over and over again. The fact that there were alternate roads to play it through, it was always fun to blast away in some level and then other times trying to take the harder level and blast that.

Everyone seems to think Devil May Cry 4 is a great game. I liked it alot until I got to play as Dante. Nero was more fun to play as (just accept it) and Dante's a little more complicated, but that would be fine if they gave Dante his own levels. You just make your way through the game just to make your way back again through the same levels with some slightly different paths. It's lazy on Capcom's part and it pisses me off!

I think that DMC 4 was a great game and is on my short list of favorites so far for all of the current videogame formats.  However, I agree that the backtracking and fluff in the game is probably the worst I have ever seen.  It's not just that you play through the levels again, but:

1. You go backwards from the end of the game back to the beginning of the game.
2. You fight every boss in the game (except for one) a second time in the same place that you had fought them the first time through the game.  You fight the first form of the final boss.
3. When you get control of the original character again, the last level of the game makes you fight every boss in the game FOR THE THIRD TIME.
4. You fight the first form of the final boss for a second time before you fight the actual final boss, who is, in fact, exactly the same as the first form of the final boss with a new desperation attack he does at the end which will kill you in one hit.  You are basically forced to fight the first form of the final boss three times within the space of a half hour.

They were great levels and great bosses but are they serious?  DMC4 is the sort of game with a ton of replayability with extra difficulty levels and unlockable costumes and weapons and characters and high scores and leaderboards, but the game effectively cancels out its replayability by forcing you to replay the entire game just to beat it once.  That means that if I play through it twice, I will have played every level four times, fought every boss six times, and fought the first form of the final boss six times.  Rather than making the refined gameplay experience that they could and should have that I would have wanted to play through a million times, they artificially extended the game's length in absolutely the worst ways possible.  As it is I was sick of replaying the game the first time I beat it and will probably not replay it again on harder difficulties as I had done with DMC 1 and 3 (as everyone knows DMC 2 does not actually count as a video game).

Thankfully though I can say there aren't many examples of this in video games today.  In classic games it was basically a given that you would replay every boss at the end before fighting the real end boss, which was usually a mechanic designed to rob you of your lives and continues so you'd get a Game Over and need to start over.  When a modern game like DMC does that, everyone complains about how much of a terrible travesty it is and how lazy Capcom is for doing it.  This is a sign of how far videogames have come.

It's nice to wax nostalgic about how we used to speedrun Super Mario Brothers or lowball Final Fantasy IV, but seriously I think the attitude that games had more replayability and longevity in the past is less a tribute to their design and more a result of us just not having as many video games to play.  It seems like I buy a big AAA title every two weeks, whereas when I was a teenager a big title like Resident Evil or Final Fantasy would only come out every six months.  When I was a kid, it was more like once a year.  I seriously think I spend as much on videogames as I do rent(!).  If I had more free time I would buy even more video games because there are definitely lots of titles I miss out on.  When you have fewer games to play and compare to each other, it's easy to replay games a million times and think every game you play is the best game you have played all year -- it might be the only game you have played all year.

Umm because what is the point of a locked door in a video game if you get the key BEFORE you find the door? Having the key to a locked door isn't any different than having an unlocked door to begin with. Seems kinda easy to figure out, but that's just me I guess.

ya but if you find that kind of "puzzle" enjoyable then you are pretty stupid

its been a long time since i played dmc1, but if its literally just RUN PAST A DOOR, FIND KEY 1 ROOM LATER RUN BACK TO DOOR it is the worst kind of puzzle that exists. there's no need for it at all, they might as well, as grindie said, have the door unlocked at the end of the corridoor and not force you to backtrack at all.