My personal choices are:

Final Fantasy 10

Shadow of The Colossus

Mortal Kombat: Armageddon

Deus Ex

I was tempted to go with Cloud but then I remembered Cloud as a person isn't nearly as interesting as his story from nobody to deluded, broken hero. So I thought, perhaps, it's Bartz. He's an adventurous and happy guy. Bartz is, of all of them, the hero I'd want to be friends with and invite over for some Chocobo steak.

But I chose Cecil in the end because he's not only interesting as a person but has a great story of wickedness, destruction, redemption and facing dark knight Cecil as paladin Cecil is a very memorable moment from the Final Fantasy series. So he's my favourite of that Final Fantasy period.

:D Sorry guys. I saw gamespot forum and assumed this was a place for dicussion of video games. My bad! I'll try not to make the mistake of starting conversations about video games in the future.

Dude, if it doesn't appeal to you, it doesn't appeal to you. It really doesn't matter at all. You aren't obligated to be excited for and look forward to the same games as other people do, and just because a bunch of people like a game and you do not, that doesn't make your view particularly special or strange at all. You have an opinion, congratulations.ViewtifulScott

While you make a perfectly valid point, "You have to like that style of game" doesn't seem like a good reason for it to get such a high score.

Wow is this conversation circular! Everyone here seems to like begging the question. Not that I have much else better to offer. It seems to me that we do this mainly because that's just the way it's always been done.

I like it. It feels good to see progression in your character. To go from a wizard whose greatest power is conjuring a few rocks to, several hours of gameplay latter, a wizard capable of conjuring a few rocks and using 'Mordenkeinan's Make Everything Die Level Awesome' spell (a cookie to all the nerds who get the reference). As you get bigger and your powers get flashier, you feel better. The only way to keep it balanced is to make the enemies stronger. So I don't think we upgrade armour, health and weapons because the enemies get stronger. I think it's done the other way around to make us feel better and thus make the game more fun.

Of course it makes just as much sense for us to stay the same and the monsters to stay the same. Actually it makes more sense for us to stay the same and the monsters get stronger, relying on our building skill rather than our building equipment. I think the perfect balance is that the monsters become stronger faster than us so that we require better equipment and more skilled playing to get by.

And I don't like the idea of the world levelling up with us. I like the idea of revisiting the places I was when I was weaker and using my amazing new skills and powers to rain doom on the goblins who used to be such a challenge.

tl;dr No I'm not going to make allowances for your laziness. Read the whole post if you want my opinion.

The reviews didn't crush my excitement at all. What crushed my excitement was FFX-2, FFXI and FFXII. While none of them were bad...

Sorry. While none of the non-MMORPG ones were bad, they showed something of a decline. Of course looking at history we see similar things. FFVII was great and then there was a down period for a couple of games and FFX proved that Square-enix still had it and created a new high point in the Final Fantasy series. Much the same way FFV was brilliant before FFVII.

So I've got my hopes but my excitement died down long before the reviews came out.

Bayonetta was a game that slipped under my radar entirely. I'd heard about it and had a general idea of what it was like but there's a big pile of things I'm more interested in like Red Dead Redemption and the Splatter House remake. Of course Bayonetta is one of those games you can't escape even if you want to because there wass just that much hype. I saw some video, noticed Gamespot gave it a score of 8, and I read a review from a trusted source. The game sounded stylish, that much was clear.

So I logged onto the PSN store and downloaded the bayonetta demo. After discovering the "dodge everything" button and the "shoot" button I breezed through the demo and came to one conclusion. Someone looked at Devil May Cry and said "Do you know what this game needs? More naked women." Thus Bayonetta.

Now I can't say I entirely disagree with that opinion. There was a distinct lack of women taking off their clothes to perform super moves in Devil May Cry but of all the things you could have improved upon with Devil May Cry, this seems like an odd focus.

Devil May Cry was fun the first couple of times before it got a little stale and Dante's brooding stopped being adorable. But one thing Devil May Cry never was was great. From what I've seen Bayonetta is more stylish, more interesting to look at, and the boss fights slightly more interesting. But the key places where we could have improved this game like camera angles, general button mashy game play have been unaltered, and requiring me to stop watching Spongebob to win a fight.

Bayonetta doesn't seem like a bad game but apart from an interesting butterfly motif running through it, nothing is really standing out for me with this game except a strange feeling that I've done it all before. So as I click the delete button and watch the demo disappear, I'm in no way driven to pay any more attention to this bland and uninspired release.

Or am I missing something big here?

Sure. I've used game guides before. No shame in that. Games are meant to be enjoyed and there's nothing enjoyable on running around through every section of the game you've been before looking for what you're supposed to do next. This can be because I have a moment of stupidity and the answer is obvious or it could be because I stopped playing the game six months ago and have no idea what I was on.

Of course there's no shortage of times when the reason I don't what I'm supposed to do is because that oddly coloured sea shell I picked up six hours ago in the game is now meant to be combined with my character's pet kitten to summon Satan himself to cook a gourmet italian dinner for my character's boss so he can get the promotion and be given the key to the door to the next stage and the only clue I've got is a note on the fridge written in sonnet telling me to order a pizza. Sometimes the way to get ahead in the game is just a little too obscure for my brain to work out and I need some help.

So yes. Yes I've used walk throughs before.

I have a pretty awful memory when it comes to game names so excuse me for not knowing exactly what the name of this game is.

There was a game I played on the Nintendo DS not long after I first got it. You played a wizard type character and to cast spells you would hold down a shoulder button and draw a rune onto the touch screen. Draw the rune correctly and you would cast the spell. As you progressed you could combine runes for different spell effects. For example you would get a rune that created a wall of rock to block enemies and you could get a rune to conjur a fireball. If you combined these runes you could create a wall of fire.

Funnily enough when I first got my DS I thought to myself "Wouldn't it be awesome is there was a game where you used the touch screen to cast runes for magic?" Low and behold there was. This was definately the best feature of the game and I'd like to see it used more.

Moral choices seem to be the new bullet time of video games. I'm not sure who started it or whether Fable or Knights of The Old Republic popularised this idea of players walking paths of good and evil. Whoever did it I think it's time we all agreed to finish it. The obvious salability of these Morallity Systems is that you get to play the game twice. One for the good ending and one for the bad ending. The problem is that that's about all. The only other thing Morallity System seems to bring to the game is a laughable black & white philosophical approach to ethics.

The real problem is that the Morallity System isn't actually a part of the game. Take for example the game Neverwinter Nights (because I'm still on a crusade against Bioware these last couple of months) and the choice of alignment. Now of course to bring it in line with the source material (Dungeons and Dragons) you couldn't really leave out the alignment but they made no use of it. Most quests you did had no affect on your alignment and the "evil" option seemed mostly to do nothing and that doesn't help you much in terms of experience gain.

Better yet is the afore mentioned Knights of The Old Republic (I will have your head, Bioware!) where the good and evil axis is more emphesised and you gain the ability too... Use dark side force powers a little cheaper. The problem is that whether you're good or evil, the plot is still railroaded to a confrontation with an antagonist and the only change is the final cinematic. It doesn't feel like my moral choices have made much of an impact.

On the other end of the spectrum is a game like inFamous (A game I continue to nergasm over at the very mention of) where in they've done things a little better and you can do that in a persistent sandbox world. When I'm evil the world responds appropriately and when I'm good, the same is true. But despite their vast improvement over the Elder Scrolls series where fame and infamy seem to have the affect of "bugger all" over their sandbox, it still just doesn't sit right. Moral choices are shallow gimmicks and don't really add character depth. Not only does it cast a world in black and white morality but it leaves no space for exploring that black and white. Black is always one kind of black and white is always one kind of white.

It reminds me of the times when you couldn't have an action game without bullet time. Of course bullet time was at least a part of the gameplay. We're far better off with the kind of treatment we got from Prototype. There's no choice about morality, no matter how you play the game you're still a jerk. So it's time we grow out of moral choices too and maybe NOT replace it with a new shallow gimmick. There's room enough in this world for video games not trying to be trendy.