"So what if it sold horribly? It was a darn good game, so we're making sequels!!"

[OB1]

BG&E is of course a lot better than Cruis'n. Gauntlet? Hmm... that's tough. Gauntlet is more pure fun, but BG&E tries to do a lot more... that is harder.

And there you have it, folks. ABF is now certifiably insane. He prefers complete and utter shit like Gauntlet over a terrific title like BG&E. I really don't think anything else needs to be said on this matter.

And you only can think that PC RPG stories are simple if you either have the worst luck with finding good games or have no concept of not having stories always spoon-fed to you... but we're talking about this on MSN. I'm quite interested in what other people here think about the subject but it'd be hard to explain...

In short, I think that it is good for a story to be complex in its presentation to the user. Metroid Prime has a great story, and the fact that you have to look for it to find it does not in the least hurt it. It has a lot of depth, that could not be shown in any form other than text, and the way it slowly reveals things to you and you slowly begin to understand the full picture of the game's story is a great storytelling method that keeps up interest in people who care and lets people who don't just ignore it. I think it was a much better way of telling that story than having to cut out a large portion of it and putting it in as a linear game story that gets told to you one chunk at a time as you progress (with cutscenes or something). Yes, you have to actively look for story objects to get the story, but it isn't hard to do and it allowed for so much more story depth than they otherwise could have told...

OB1 thinks it has an awful story, but that's okay because they weren't trying to tell a good story anyway... you shouldn't randomly tell facts out of order in little bits. Bad storytelling method (but I'm sure you can explain it better OB1...).

*sigh*
You act as if being "spoon-fed" a story is a bad thing. It's what us humans call story-telling, ABF. You won't believe how it works! Get this: Good story-telling is usually told in some way, be it verbally, through text, through a movie, etc. Presentation, pacing, and composition are three very important parts of story-telling. Without these three things, even the best concepts can fall flat and become bad stories. With books and movies, people have had plenty of time to perfect methods of story-telling, while with games the only real success in solid story-telling has been when the stories were presented like movies, the closest visual medium to video games. And while it is effective, video games as an art form have a long way to go and will be probably be a while before a method of story-telling unique to video games becomes the standard. A bunch of text in random order--no matter what it amounts to when you put it all together--is most certainly not good and effective story-telling. In fact it's not really story-telling at all. You can get a story that way, and it can work for what the developers were trying to do (as in the case with Prime), but it's definitely not telling a story well. You don't play Prime for the story. You play Silent Hill or Grim Fandango for the story.