I plugged away at the game whenever I could squeeze an hour away from my day job and my family. All told, I spent far more than 40 hours -- but still only got two-thirds through.

All of which makes me wonder: Who the heck actually finishes a story-based game in 40 hours? Who are these mythical 40-hour gamers?

Later on, he answers his own question: the 40-hour people are simply gamers younger than he, without jobs, without kids, without other interests, without books to read. Which is so incredibly obvious (and vaguely insulting) I'm surprised he managed to wring enough paragraphs to make a entire article about it. Of course, this is all weblog-based conjecture; my purely fabricated experience suggests that most "kids" with all the time in the world to play story-based games wind up preferring non-story-based games like Halo or Starcraft. How deliciously ironic!

Although he positions his article as if this is an industry-wide problem, it really just comes down to him sucking. Tomb Raider: Legend was a terrible example; I haven't seen one comment, net-wide, that agrees with him on that one. The concensus is that anybody who couldn't finish Legend in under 40 hours must be a Civil War vet. He might have managed a valid point if he had stuck with Kingdom Hearts 2 as his example, which is definitely story-based and indisputably a long game. Might have.

Video game "adventures" are getting longer, no doubt. Compare Super Mario Bros to Super Mario Sunshine. When I watched that YouTube video of the Game Boy game Gargoyle's Quest in under 25 minutes, I was surprised that the entire game could be done under half an hour (of course, that 25 minutes runs a cheat that kills enemies in one shot... but even with legimate damage, you're looking at an hour, tops). I remember spending weeks in 1991 to beat that game.

But gamers' skills are improving as well... and that's the real reason why games are getting longer. Because we expect more and more to challenge our abilities. Believe it, game companies would like nothing more than to sell us shorter games and have us be happy... because shorter games means we're right back in the EB next week for another purchase.

Sounds to me like Clive has hit the wall. He's like a half-hour sitcom fan complaining that everything on his favorite channel is now hour-long dramas. You have to go watch something else, dude. Clive, I think you need to find other games to play. There are plenty of story-based games that are A) Not That Long and B) Not That Hard. I would place Beyond Good & Evil (although the story sucks), Fatal Frame, Red Dead Revolver, and Sly Cooper as all being firmly within your grasp, time-wise. Go to it.

I hate when people try to paint the entire universe of video games in broad strokes. "All cutscenes are awful!" "All story-based games are too long!" "All Nintendo games are for kids!" "All console shooters are inferior to PC shooters!" We have a nicely mature industry here, folks. There are plenty of games for everyone.

And for freaking firemen's jamboree, quit buying new games that you really want to play when you haven't finished your old games that you really wanted to play! What kind of impulsive dumbass are you? You complain about not having enough time, so you go buy another one? Don't whine to me about your family getting in the way when you're the chucklehead out there indiscriminately making purchases.

...Actually, seeing as how you're a paid gaming columnist for a genuine respected magazine, I wonder if your problem isn't that you get too many free games sent to you for review. Which, quite frankly, isn't the kind of problem you should grouse about.

Clive doesn't come off as a sympathetic figure. He sounds like a dilettante. As if it is the game industry's fault that he doesn't have the time to finish the games he buys. Dude, either you're into video games or you're not. I'm into them. I invested the 40+ hours to beating Kingdom Hearts 2. And over 80 hours in on San Andreas. Over 150 on Pokemon Sapphire (although the storyline part stopped around hour 50). And uncountable time spent inside Animal Crossing, where there was absolutely nothing to do at all. Because it's my thing and I find the time to do it. Not to mention so many other smaller games that capped in the 12-20 hour range (which sometimes is a satisfying length and sometimes it isn't.) And, holy shit, I have a wife and a job and a house and a child.

You know what's the nice thing about entertainment media? You can turn it off whenever you like. You can put down the book. You can shut off the web browser. You can walk out in the middle of King Kong. And you can be totally fine with that, because, dude, it's your life and you have to prioritize it.

But don't go around whining because you didn't get the whole story.