thats it

Final Fantasy X isn't quite synonymous with cutscene length. The game Xenosaga however...what was it, like 30 minutes long for the cut scene to roll by?

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 ;)

Depends on the game. Generaly I have absolutely no problem with cutscenes in any game, but in action games it can be a drag.
For RPGs? I don't even notice them.

For the record, I think Gears of War hits this balance just about perfectly, especially the second game. You're never just shown something that would be better played.

Gears really does not have a good balance, at the start of chapter 5, there was no explanation as to why you are getting on that train, and why the CoG's lightmass bomb is under Locust control on a train

Look that confused me too, but I'm talking about the gameplay to cutscene ratio.

It is not right, because we needed a cut scene explaining that. I took a break between playing the end of act 4 and finishing the game, and so just assumed that I had missed a cut-scene, but there are just not enough cut scenes in that game. GeoW 2 is better, but I would still call it light on story.

Being light on story has nothing to do with it, I'm saying that Gears of War never shows you something that's more fun to play. The first Gears did have that one big hole in the narrative, yes, bu that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

Gears 2 was of course better for this, but not because the narrative was more complete. It was betteer in this aspect because you could ride a Brumak.

@ khuutra, if the story is rubbish because they have not explained something it clearly they have got enough cut scenes in there. If they had just included a scene back at HQ with Hoffman then it would have been much better and I would not end the game feeling slightly confused