How Long is Long Enough?

This is not a post about penis size, let's get that out the way now before all the comedians out there pipe up and get the two pence (cents) worth in.
I find myself getting frustrated with the length of video games, and it's a problem that has seemingly been present since I got my PS2 back in 2001, and has steadily become more of an issue since then. I don't know if it's just me that finds this, but most modern games have a very short length, which is something that I found to be an issue in both of my recent reviews for Wet and Halo 3: ODST. I find this to be an issue with a good 80% of the games I have played through in the last 7 or 8 years, even COD4 and Halo 3 were not as long as would have liked, it seems to be a common trend now that singleplayer campaigns average out at around 7 - 15 hours, which leads me to ask: is this long enough?
The games I played through prior to 2001 had much longer length, and while I wasn't anywhere near as involved in video games than as I am now, I played a variety of games across SNES, Megadrive (Genesis), Master System, PC, PlayStation and N64, all of which had some good sized games that kept you playing for hours upon hours. In my childhood, I spent hours on the SNES, playing games like Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda, and even games where saving wasn't common place, they were huge adventures that would absorb hours upon hours of button bashing, brightly coloured, imaginative mayhem. But then again, time is relative to the observer, and when you are a kid time seemed to move much slower, so is this all a figment of my imagination? I also have to appreciate that my gaming sessions had time limits placed on them by my parents to an extent, so probably only lasted 1 or 2 hours at a time as opposed to the 5 or even 10 hour sessions I sometimes clock in at on a lazy Sunday these days.
I think not, because even today there are a few games that just seem to last forever, and a stark contrast exists between these long epic adventures compared to the short chapter like games that account for most of what is out there. Final Fantasy games can easily suck up over 100 hours if you try to accomplish everything on offer, and a couple of these are so good that you want to play them through a second, or even third time. The gargantuan offerings from Bethesda that take the forms of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3 both have had me clocking in over 100 hours each, and with such gigantic single player adventures such as these I can't help but feel other game developers are simply lazy and looking to make a quick buck.
It's a difficult to take a side on this argument, because I am also aware that there are limitations on technology, story, and ideas, as well as limitations posed by the type of games. when a shorter game is released, is it because the developer has spent their time trying to make a more solid gaming experience, so that what is offered may not be very long, but is of extremely high quality? This is certainly the case some of the time, COD4 and Halo 3 being the two examples used above that would also fall into this category, but there are also some very low quality items produced that are also very short in length, but maybe due to their poor quality that is a blessing, I've had a run in with a couple of less than amazing games recently (reviews pending), and I find that I can't be bothered to finish these.
The other factor that changes the shape of the argument completely is the presence of multiplayer, I may hammer my way through most FPS' in 2 or 3 sittings, but if the multiplayer is good, there really is no limit to the amount of time you could spend interacting and shooting other human beings, and I'm sure the same is true for many other genres such as racing games. But should a game rely on multiplayer? For me, multiplayer is an afterthought when I consider buying a game, unless I know ahead of time it's something that me and my friends are all going to get heavily involved in.
I don't really have a conclusion or direction to take this debate to, but if anyone has any thoughts or opposing views I would love to hear them.

Review: Wet - Xbox 360

If Max Payne and Lara Croft had a drunk and steamy night together, then Rubi - Wet's anti hero protagonist - would have been their daughter... their rebellious, morally grey daughter. She dives, slides, flips, runs up and along walls, and swings around flag poles in slow motion while blasting dual weapons at relentless crowds of thugs, criminals and anyone else unfortunate enough to get in her way. She's crude, she's rude and if you tried to chat her up in a bar you'd probably end up locked in a cubicle in the gents sobbing into your lap. Controlling her is relatively easy and standard, left stick for movement, right stick for camera/aiming, right trigger to shoot. Other buttons are mapped as follows: A - Jump/Dive in slow motion, B - Slide along the floor in slow mo (which you can do on it's own or at the end of a dive), X - use your sword, Y - is your context sensitive action button, use zip lines, open doors, etc. Any time you do anything slightly acrobatic and pull the right trigger to fire your gun, the world slows down but you can still aim in real time, giving a very matrix effect to the whole affair. One very cool thing about this is that Rubi makes good use of dual wielding her guns, any time you are in acrobatic slow mo, she will auto aim one of her guns at an enemy who will be highlighted, allowing you to either target the same one or a totally different guy to make every bullet count, which provides some awesome cinematic moments as you slide on your knees into a room shooting two gangsters in the head at the same time.
The more stylish your moves the more points you rack up, and these are used in an upgrade shop to purchase new moves and upgrade your guns. And with that masterfully executed link, your guns come in 4 flavours, standard dual pistols which provide infinite ammo, dual shotguns for getting up close and personal, dual sub machine guns for spray and prey mayhem, and lastly dual cross bows that fire explosive bolts for when you absolutely, positively have to kill every mother f*cker in the room.
The levels themselves are all designed with plenty of scenery to dive behind, jump onto, grab hold of, and leap from to showcase Rubi's acrobatic prowess, and are all styled in the appropriate scenery as the story demands - US west coast freeway, hong kong opera house, london docks, and so forth. The story is presented in a Tarantino grindhouse style, larger than life characters that are treated as every day occurrences the world they exist in, the midget torture expert, the female, blind, albino, gothic body guard, the token British bad guy (4 of them in fact) and of course rubi herself closely resembles a more gothy version of the bride from Kill Bill.
A few set piece levels break up the action a bit; jumping from car to car on the freeway while having a shoot out with the mafia who are shooting at you from speeding cars, various sections of levels where Rubi gets blood in her eyes and literally sees red allowing you to go into a berserker mode painted in a noir pallet of reds, whites and blacks. There is even one level, caused by Rubi's less than stealthy infiltration of a carrier jet, that sees Rubi sky diving without a parachute amongst the wreckage of said jet, while shooting the other doomed occupants (who despite their predicament still seem to be hell bent on putting as many bullets your way as possible), avoiding the chunks of wreckage that are hurtling towards London's sky line with you, and trying to grab the only parachute in sight, which is bolted to the inside of a piece of the hull. This scene seems to have been completely lifted from the Clive Owen movie 'shoot 'em up', only Wet somehow manages to make it more believable!
The run time of 8 - 9 hours on normal difficulty seems to be pretty standard these days, I'd rather it was longer but as all other games of it's type seem to be about the same length, criticising it would be unfair. What really got my goat was the lack of New Game+ or being able to revisit the levels you have already done, once you reach the end of the game, that's it, you can either start over, from scratch without any of the skills you have unlocked, or just play through the final scene again, which wasn't much of a boss fight, but fitted well with the grindhouse setting. Not being able to go back and play the memorable moments again with your full arsenal feels, at best, like a huge oversight, and at worst, like a very cheap way of forcing you to replay the game.
Technically there are not many faults with the game, I didn't see many glitches, a couple of visual quips here and there, and while the graphics aren't ground breaking, they are tailored to the grindhouse theme, although I turned off the movie scratch/grain effect immediately to avoid feeling ill.
Scoring this game isn't all that easy, I had fun playing it and there were some truly breathtaking moments of over the top action and violence. It's faults are not really in what it has and does, but rather in what it lacks, there are key features that I feel should have been included, some as standard, and that's what really brings this game down for me, an anti climax to the fun.

6.5/10

Watch this space

Ok, lots happening people, lots and lots.
As it's the first post you have no idea what exactly 'lots and lots' entails, so here is a quick run down of what this is all about; I like gaming. to the masses this means playing video games, and that is correct, I love it, experiencing adventures and living stories I wouldn't otherwise experience, and of course blowing shit up. But, I also love gaming in the sense of pick-up, seduction, and 'The Game'.
So in regards to 'lots and lots', I've got plenty to post, I've written a review of 'Wet'; the bullet-time, grind house, slug fest starring Elisha Dushku; that I will be posting later on today or tomorrow. I also just got 'Halo 3: ODST' through the post, so will be posting my thoughts and opinions on this as I progress through the game. I'll probably be posting various musing generated by my enthusiasm for upcoming titles like Assassins Creed 2, Splinter Cell: Conviction, and of course Modern Warfare 2.
In regards to the other gaming, I'm currently in the process of putting together a lesson plan to teach the system I'm currently using, this is more for me than anyone else really, in doing this I have clarified and streamlined my own knowledge, and by teaching it I believe I will hone and develop my skills. That said, I do get a kick out of helping people out and it's serious fun as well, so right now I'm looking for local guinea pigs to trial this on, it's been code named 'Project Skywalker' (the inner geek seeping through the cracks there) until I find a more fitting title.
Specific areas of pick-up I'm aiming to discuss at the minute outside of Project Skywalker are dance floor game, text/phone/follow up game, day 2 game, and training and using wing girls.

So like I said, plenty is on it's way, watch this space...