Kirklebum

Commando was annoying but after I played a while I figured out how to avoid it for the most part. I think I get more annoyed by getting killed by a blindly fired M203 round. Every game is going to have a cheese tactic but I don't feel the MW2 was horribly unbalanced by it. My kill-to-death ratio was still good enough where I had fun even with a few deaths by cheap tactics. The satisfaction I got from killing somebody with a shotgun or hip-fire just before they commandoed me ultimately made up for it. MW2 is the junk food of video games, just remember you're eating Cheez Wiz and not aged Gouda.

I won't buy the book. The next Halo game will just retcon it anyway. I learned my lesson with The Fall of Reach.

Hirshberg is a smart guy. I'm sure he knows that in all legitimate, and I use that term loosely when describing ESPN, news organizations the advertising department is separate from the editorial department. Hirshberg just saw an opportunity to gain more attention for the game by stoking what little controversy there was. Skip Bayless is a notorious pundit on ESPN. He almost always plays the devil's advocate. Just google his name and you can find hundreds of instances where he's making stupid arguments about stupid things.

Ultimately both parties achieved their goal. People are talking about it. They both win.

As a game reviewer, I think there's a point about criticizing a game being too short but it seems like it would behoove the developer to make a game that has enough stuff in it to make the consumer glad they paid $60 for the game instead of renting it. I don't know the economics involved but I'm sure the game's developer makes more money off a $60 sale than a $5 rental from the video store or when somebody waits a year and buys it used.

When I was a kid, and didn't have an allowance, I'd do chores and odd jobs for neighbors to save up enough money to buy a game. I'd never buy a game that was short, I used to play a ton of shitty JRPGs just because I knew if I bought one I would be able to spend 200 hours in the game over the course of the next three or four months until I could afford to buy another game.

I didn't care how great the story was, if I could beat the game in 5 or 6 hours I wouldn't buy it. As I got older and things changed - college, women and lots of booze - I no longer wanted to spend 200 hours in a game. I still liked video games but instead of spending 25-plus hours a week playing video games like I did as a kid, I'd play maybe 5-10 hours. I began to realize I was missing out on a lot of great games and found that I could rent games for cheap and if it was shorter than about 10 hours I could usually beat the game on a one-week rental.

I couldn't afford to buy every game I wanted to play, and my college friends were just as poor as I was, so I would rent shorter games and only buy games I knew had longer stories, or if the story was short had lots of re-playability.

Now that I have a real job, I can afford to enjoy the finer things in life that cost a little more. I don't need my games to have enough content to keep me occupied for three months any more. I'm fine with paying for a five, eight or 10-hour experience if it's good enough. But, having gone through many different stages of video game habits I know that I haven't always appreciated the quality of the experience as much as the quantity.

It's like if you're a kid and you go to the grocery store and you have $5 and you see you can buy 6 bottles of the store brand cola or 3 bottles of Pepsi or Coke. I didn't care if the store brand was watered down and didn't quite taste right, I was going to rot my teeth as fast as possible. Now I'll buy the name brand because I don't want to drink 6 bottles of shitty soda and I want what I do drink to taste good.

So while I think it's unfair to dock a game's score because it was too short, length is a part of the larger picture that people use to determine where to spend their money. It might not matter to the more mature gamer but, like-it-or-not, it does matter to many people. I know this is way too long, but now that I'm older and pretentious like you I can say that length doesn't matter, it's about the quality of the experience, right?