Something else to keep in mind is that you can't just "add story" to games to make them better. This is often tossed around - if story can be done well, why give games a pass for not having a good one?

This overlooks that any storytelling comes at a price, most obviously in dialogue and cutscenes. Would any possible story (within reason) have justified making players sit through bubble after bubble of text? Most people don't seem to think so. Most people would rather just get to the game, and, for them, your vaunted story is just an extra-long and entirely needless loading screen, and we know what that can do to our opinion of a game. I know I'm not the only one that sits there pounding the 'A' button in games until they finally get around to telling me where I need to go to get to the next stage.

Yes, perhaps there exists some possible story that would be good enough to justify preventing people from just playing the next galaxy, but look around at other games.  When the mechanics are as well-liked as the ones in Galaxy, you need a story that's going to be as well-liked as freaking Tolkien.  Story-telling in games is just years and years behind game-playing in games.  And if your story is that good, why not leave it out of your game and write a book or make a movie instead?

And that's really where I think people like this God of War guy went wrong.  Games are a horrible medium for story-telling, and anyone who primarily wants to tell stories is just in the wrong business.  You should be writing or directing.  If you can't cut it as an author or a filmmaker, I'm sorry, but don't act like you're some creative genius for trying to shoehorn second-rate stories into video games.  This is mostly directed at the Gears of War guy, actually, if what Bod said about comparing his work to Shakespeare's is at all accurate.

To sum up this and my last post, however, it's just silly to criticize a game for not having a story when the game's mechanics are so good that any realistically possible story would only make most players unhappy.  A game only needs a story to shore up weaknesses elsewhere, and games without weaknesses elsewhere are better for the lack of a story.  To offer a potentially dangerous analogy, we only get upset at people for not wearing clothes when we don't want to see them naked, but naked is far preferable to clothed for the people we most want to see.  

I'd rather the storytelling be told in the gameplay. Which is why Ico's is so fantastic.

I enjoyed God of War but the story while fun was best described as a "Greek mythology fanfic" by someone on another board.