I can stand em, as long you can skip those and aren't clueless what to do next when you have skipped those.

1. Make the cutscene fairly short, even if it's important.
2. Never, ever have a cutscene that could be more fun playing it. This is a rule often broken.
3. Always allow skipping of cutscenes. Yes, even the first time through.

If those rules are followed I don't mind so much. If there is more than 1 minute of cutscene for every 50 minutes of play time it's probably too much though.

I don't play JRPGs and have no interest in games like MGS4 for exactly that reason. If I want a movie I'll watch one.

Maybe I'm oldschool but I grew up with pac-man and so I play video games to play games. I don't mind short cut scenes to give perpective to the action, or in a WRPG or Adventure to move the short forward. But anything more than 5 minutes is way too long.

Generally 2 minutes is appropriate for games in my mind.

These are exactly my thoughts about MGS4. I actually greatly preferred the Codecs because they really got you to know the characters involved on a personal level through the light flirting with the women and the joking around with the guys. MGS4 didn't have any of that. Snake was too busy coughing and dying to actually be the cool guy we all fell in love with back in MGS.

I love cut scenes, as long as their not boring.

If I can as much enjoyment out of the gameplay as I did the cut scene then I'm good.

I'm with ya on this one Khuutra, especially on the latter part. It really does bug me when I see a cut scene that could have been much more fun to experience in game, where I could actually... you know... play it. QTE is a step in the right direction over just a plain ol' action packed cutscene (ex: Leon vs. Krauser knife fight in RE4), but even that feels dated compared to what we've accomplished through our software, hardware, and control methods thus far.

Interactivity is key, and in my video games, I'd like to see as much of it as possible. So developers, find a better way to work in and through your medium (good ex: audio diaries in Bioshock). The PS1 came out 14 years ago for Pete's sake.

Well, to take MGS4 as an example:

Some cutscenes, like Big Mama's explanation, the end of Act 3 and the Debriefing were extremely entertaining to watch, so entertaining that I watched them on both playthroughs. Same with the opening cutscene.

Some cutscenes, like Snake meeting Drebin, I just about managed to watch once. I watched each cutscene at LEAST once, even if I was groaning through it, so I wouldn't miss anything.

Overall, I like them when the graphics are good, they don't repeat themselves, and they are interesting.

While I agree that interactivity is key, and showing something in a cutscene that would have been more fun to play (DMC4 is a great example of this), I think the audio diaries in Bioshock are a very bad example.

Why have people recorded everything they thought aloud to themselves, and why are these diaries all intact and spread throughout Rapture. It makes no sense at all.

Personally, I would much rather have a cutscene that preserves the atmosphere, than something that brakes all the laws of logic and takes you out of the game by doing so.

Mindless fun, eh?

A game sets it's own boundaries, and when a game decides to have basis in reality and build upon it, then logic is by default a part of it.

You don't wonder about hearing voices (as in Stephen Fry telling you about neat little things you can do) in the middle of LittleBigPlanet, because it is within the boundaries the game has for it self. But if there was CGI cutscenes in LBP, they would likely strike you unfitting for the game, the game really wasn't build for that kind of thing.

i loved the MGS4 cutscenes because i got to look at the photo-realistic graphics