I work for the civil service. One of the plusses of that particular line of work is that I get the occasional extra day off - known in the trade as a "privelidge day". As you can probably imagine, I spend quite a lot of these days playing video games. I had one yesterday and devoted several hours to Knights of the Old Republic.

I was vaguley hopeful I might get it finished, but it seems not although I am pretty close to the end now. I've been playing it a long, long time. Over 24 hours of play time according to my save game files and excellent game though it is, truth be told I'm starting to get a bit sick of it.

Normally I love games that have huge play time. If I'm shelling out my hard earned cash for a videogame then I want to be entertained, and want to be entertained for a long time. My all time classics list would be composed almost entirely of games that have vast replay value, usually because they've got some variable tactical element that allows the player to approach the challenge of the game in more than one way.

The key phrase here is "replay". KOTOR has replay value, certainley, but only to unlock the dialogue and quest options you missed the first time around. There's not much tactical replay. It's the just more of the same, spread out over a long, long period of time.

Since KOTOR, like most RPG's is plot driven, it gets annoying that the game is so spread out that as I approached the end of the game, I found that I'd forgotten several important plot points that were revealed early in the game. Imagine watching a film 24 hours long split into hour long episodes over the course of several months. Imagine that at the end of the series it kept referring back to stuff that happened near the beginning. You'd forget some of what was going on, wouldn't you? I sure have. And that's where you need to be a bit careful with long games and intricate plots. Bite size pieces please!

** spolier warning **

Of course, it could be that I'm just annoyed because the game diverts you off onto another planet with another 4 odd hours of gameplay just when you think you're nearing the finale. But then again ...