I like having a good story in any game, but some game companies go a little too far. The Half Life story kicks the almighty hell out of the Metal Gear games, and between the four installments of you playing as Gordon Freeman, there's less than fifteen minutes of cutscenes, and the game never leaves the eyes of the player.

I hated MGS2 because all I did was run down a hallway, shoot a guy with a tranq dart, go to a 15-minute cutscene, save my game/listen to a 15-minute conversation, walk down a hallway, shoot a dart.... repeat for 20 hours till the game's over. Meanwhile, I get to see cool gun battles with my character diving around explosions and bullets, but then I just go to a scene where I shoot a gun till it's out of ammo (which is very quick, and you can only do it in boss fights unless you want every soldier up your ass because of the gunshot sounds) then go back to shooting darts.

I'm fine with cutscenes, but consider this:

"Oh man, remember in Half Life 2 where you had to fight through Ravenholme with no ammo, and got to cut up zombies with propellers, squish them with cars, and throw sawblades at them?

"Yeah, that was righteous. It was almost as cool as when you had to fight those giant spiders with sticky bombs and a Road-Warrior-looking-Charger."

"Fuckin A."

Versus:

"Remember when we got to watch Ocelot kill like three guards at the same time with a six-shooter?"

"Yeah, it beat having to listen to Raiden whine about his girlfriend while shooting tranquilizer darts, and making him swim with a girl on his back."

"Uh-huh."

I heard MGS3 was different, but the fact that MGS2 spawned an era where games were basically just CDi games with better graphics just makes me mad.