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

[OB1]

No to creative writing or film. Literature? Umm... yeah, I guess so. If you mean reading stuff and writing reaction papers.

English has never been one of my favorite classes... but I think I'm plenty qualified to say what kind of storytelling I liked and what I liked less. Though I'd love to hear the opinions of other people here on this subject too! It'd be great...

Well there you go. It's fine if you like it, but on a more objective level it's definitely not good story-telling.

If you believe that you are a sad, deluded human being.

Again with the witty retorts.

MP has an interesting story [well actually it's probably more accurate to call it a back story since it's mostly events that lead up to the game], but the presentation isn't the best. Having random clips of backstory scattered across the game is no where near as good as having scenes [flashbacks maybe] throughout the game. Like maybe you find hidden video discs or something that you can view that chronicle the history of the Chozen rather than just random paragraphs or there could be scenes that show the past events from the perspective of one of the Chozo. The way MP did it's story ISN'T bad, but there are better ways.

Well said. If Retro had wanted to tell a good story then they would have found ways to do it, but as it is they weren't trying to be Metal Gear Solid with Metroid Prime. They did say that they were going to try and tell a good story with MP2, though. If they had the cinematic presentation of Zero Mission coupled with the substance in their stories, it could make for one awesome, well-presented plot.

Making referrence to a comment OB1 made earlier in the thread, videogames usually need to rely on cinematics to tell a story because movies are the closest visual medium to videogames. The difference being that videogames are interractive, so if videogames are to find storytelling methods that are unique I think making it fully interractive and at the players' discretion be a great step in the right direction.

Yes, I definitely agree with that. As I stated before, developers have not yet figured out an ideal and unique way of telling good stories in video games, it's still in the experimental stages. Right now the best game stories are usually the ones that rely on cinematics, something I don't quite agree with but can't really think of a better solution yet. To really tell a good story and take advantage of the unique qualities of video games, you would have to make the player feel like they are taking a part of the story and actually affecting its outcome. Some games do that to a certain extent, games like Deus Ex. The problem is in that series the story unfolds completely through emotionless conversations and text. The story lacks emotion, as do the bits of text you pick up in Metroid Prime and those other games ABF mentioned. Video games are a visual medium and as such need to effectively use visuals when telling a story. If I had to choose two games that tell stories most effectively, I'd choose Silent Hill (series) and ICO. In both games, you're given enough information through a few cinematics to basically form a story in your head while you're playing them, and while neither is very complex, they tell their stories very effectively through visuals and atmosphere. ICO has a very classic Brothers Grimm-type story that you don't even need any dialogue to know what's going on (and you don't understand a thing anyone is saying, in the US version at least) because it completely relies on the emotion between the two characters and their situation to really feel for them and make you feel like you're controlling the story (even though you don't).

But anyhow, just plan cinematics ala MGS are not the answer, but neither are boring pieces of text strewn about all over the place.