I still have some time before the game is released though so I asked around for some good recommendations for story driven games. The Uncharted series and Metal Gear Solid 4 were both recommended to me.

I had heard that MGS4 had an epic amount of cut-scenes and have been a follower of the series since the NES days. For those that haven’t played the game it is broken down into 5 acts with a very lengthy cut-scene between each act. All of these scenes tell the story and tie together the numerous locations involved in MGS4.

I found I was getting sucked into the story as always but one thing constantly bothered me about the presentation. The pacing of these cut-scenes were far to slow. It seemed like the pauses in dialog were much too long, sections could have been easily condensed giving the scenes even greater impact.

The scene opens up with Liquid driving into a trap set my Meryl. The tension is set from the first few shots but it drags on too long before anything happens, the shots of the faces, some random grunting you lose a little intensity.

Then as the trap is revealed you see Meryl’s forces revealing themselves first some assault boats, then some very badass looking blackhawk helicopters, then some not very impressive jeeps. Again the intensity of the scene drops because of a poor choice in pacing. The focus shifted to a less impressive element that retained that focus for far to long.

The whole scene is still very impressive there is no doubt but If you are going to create a 10 minute cut-scene the pacing needs to be bang on as well. You could probably cut the scene down to 8 minutes quite easily and even up the intensity a little with very little effort.

The motion controls for doing things in the game are totally garbage. Its almost as if someone from the marketing department said “We need to have six axis support in our game” and to which the developers replied “Oh ok well throw these stupid ass logs in the game and force you to throw grenades with the motion controls”.

At least this gave them an excuse to cover up the fact that the grenades are pretty garbage anyways. I wouldn’t have used them much even if I could aim them without looking like I’m trying to get my HD OTA antenna to pick up a signal. With SIX AXIS controls for throwing grenades, a weapon that is just not worth using (the guns are just as good at killing people) is hidden by adding controls so awful that you’ll never want to use them again. Pretty smart if you ask me.

You know what is also annoying? When you have to balance on those stupid logs the way you move the controller is opposite to what you’d expect. It took me literally the entire game to figure this out, I must have fallen off of every stupid log in the game.

I figured this must have been an isolated incident so I fired up a game I borrowed from a buddy of mine, Heavenly Sword. So I get to this cannon ball section and I have to steer cannon balls with the stupid controller. I pretty much shut the game off right there as I feared I might hulk out and start smashing my newly acquired PS3.

Just because the controller has a sensor in it doesn’t mean you need to use it. In fact I would venture to say even if you think you have a great idea for a motion control, you really don’t. Just kill that thought. Tacking sixaxis onto a game that was never designed for motion control is the single most stupid thing I can think of. If there are any games out there that use this well let me know because right now I’m at 0 for 2.