I love cutscenes, especially the fully realised realtime ones which take the time to go into great detail about the plot and characters and add a certain degree of interactivity.
MGS4's are by far the best directed and mo capped in the industry, so they never felt long. Hell, i was shocked to hear it has over 9 hours of cutscenes as i never, not for a second, thought they were too long, whereas on the second LOTR movie for example, by the time they were lighting those fires i had to stop and have a quiet uninterrupted smoke, i was "that" bored.
On a side note, can't say i'm very fond of Fallout's, Bioshok's or Half Life's type of storytelling. Yes, it is cheap, many devs may prefer it for this reason, you don't need professional direction and ultra advanced mo cap studios, but it is very limited, emotionless and ultimatelly completely unrewarding, and frankly, instead of watching a horribly animated lifeless character talking to me, or stoping and listening to an audio tape and do it like 50 times over, gimme my Hollywood level directed cutscenes please. I like to feel like i'm watching a good movie, not taking part in a crappy one where robots try to act like humans...and fail misserably.
I quit smoking btw, like almost 4 years ago ;)
"You have the right to the remains of a silent attorney"
