One of the reasons that I chose to put the money down on braid was that it was a single player experience. This is the way I experience most of my games, and a strong single user experience is important to me. Unfortunately, I find that the “community” seems to ignore this often. I look to game reviewers to reflect on this, but unfortunately it is weak at best. A great example is Halo. The first game had a pretty solid single user experience, and it was better with a co-op experience (good for roommates). However, Halo made it’s money on the online user experience (especially with halo 2). This is something I never indulged in, expecting the single user experience to pull me through. Unfortunately it was weak in Halo 2, and “3″ has yet to pull me in long enough to play more than 20 minutes. Apparently the multiplayer is awesome, but I just don’t care. Anyhoo, for the same reason as braid I find Halo 3 to be a bad value. In that it is great at what it intends to do, but is not what I am looking for. However, the way games are reviewed are very general, and really I think there needs to be a movement toward reviewing games from a pluralistic standpoint.
When movies are reviewed, the critics have the benefit of knowing that all the audience will be watching. That is all you get. with games, you may only be looking for a multi-user experience. If so, bomberman is the best game ever, but dig-dug sucks. For someone who is looking for a single user experience, the opposite would be true. A score of “88″ or “B” or “4 bananas” gives no distinction to these different playing styles.

On a bigger level, this is the problem I see with the live arcade. It isn’t a true market, as no price deductions take place as interest in the property wanes. For example Geometry wars 2 was just released, any change in the cost of the first? Nope. This is fine for classic arcade like games, where the point is a high score. For story based games though, which have limited replay value, I am dissapointed that they are treated the same way.

With regard to Braid, the topic of value in story based games have been discussed before. With this game, it was fantastic, but i don’t think was a good value.

About the writing, I too found some of it a bit over the top. While I think in act 1, you’re being very critical of characters introduced for just a measly one scene, HK did stretch things a bit. For example, it seems if a character from the past could have some plausible relationship/dealing with something, they most often did, and I feel that cheapens the whole MGS world.

Still love MGS4 though – not as good as 1, but its probably my 2nd favorite. By the way, you can pop out of cover and shoot(and you have been able to since MGS2) so I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about there.