Do beginnings in games suck?

So the latest Outlook thread-that-wont-die comes courtesy of uber-professional games site Next-Gen.biz / Edge magazine whose columnist Mr. Biffo takes a minute to talk about how some of the beginnings in the latest rounds of chart toppers... well... suck.

"As I’m still working my way through the 2007 backlog, there are a couple of games I’ve been playing quite a bit of late: Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect. Despite a mixed critical reaction they’re not bad games, but in both instances I almost gave up in the first half hour of ‘play’."

Biffo continues on to say:

"If you think of them as action movies, it’d be like opening the entire Star Wars saga with that tedious senate debate from The Phantom Menace rather than the iconic Star Destroyer crawl."

The full story can be found here in case you are interested.

To be honest, I kind of agree with him. Mass Effect took me a long-ass time to get into and after 20 hours I decided to put it down. I thought it took Skate for fucking EVER to get past the initial training stages and I didn't touch Assasin's Creed because one of my best buddies said that it was the first game that he ever actually regretted purchasing for the 360.


Remember at the beginning of Sonic 2 when Robotnik shot down the Tornado? Sonic was trying to ride all gangsta on the wing and got his ass shot down. What a fucking prick.

Maybe it's my generation of gamer, but growing up I remembered games that grabbed you by the nuts right after "Press Start." Maybe it was because a lot of the games I loved were arcade-based and designed with the old "I've got 3.5 minutes to get this kid to put in another quarter, I better make it hot" mentality. Games back then didn't need big stories to sell themselves to the player - Their game mechanics did the work for them.

I dunno - What do you think? Do the latest round of game beginnings kinda suck? What are some of your favorites in recent memory and all time?

One of my favorites of all time is still The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past. Who can ever forget the princess telling Link to get his sorry ass out of bed to come save her that dark and stormy eve? Edgy, repeating music playing. Haha - Loved it.