EGM scores. Some pretty big games.

[A Black Falcon]

I played the first few hours of the game. Is the entire story told the same way?

You start out in the wilderness with a mission that will take most of the game to complete. You go out knowing nothing about the world, find the first town and talk to the people there, get missions and progress, orjust wander around and do your own thing... you do have to do the main quest, but it's got a lot of variablity and replay value and non-linearity. Too much non-linearity in the storyline (like having to search people out and talk to them instead of being given the story) for you or something? I don't know why you dislike it...

Stupid, your argument is that games are "also books" because a lot of them have text, but so to silent films. And do you know why that is? Because of limitations in sound up until fairly recently! Silent Films used text because they couldn't use sound, and the exact same thing goes for games (in that paricular case, high-quality sound)! Your argument that games are not just a visual medium because so many games use text is incredibly retarded, baffling beyond words.

My point is just that books are just as good a source for games to have their stories and style inspired by as movies are...

As for speech, limitations of sound are the main reason, but for some games the volume of speech also is -- it'd just take too long to speak every line in Baldur's Gate... (how does KotOR do it? By not speaking out the lines aliens say -- and there are a lot of them -- and by cutting down the amount of lines somewhat.). But that's really just a presentation issue, not a deep gameplay one.