Cutscenes – bane or boon?

Clive Thomson, of Slate, wrote a piece on the hassles of cutscenes… and condemns their use in Halo and Halo 2.

Both games had forgettable storylines—pure alien-invasion boilerplate—that were redeemed by the game’s superrealistic physics.

Ouch! You might disagree, but the general argument (that cutscenes tend to pull you out of the immersivity the games engender) is a reasonable one. Thanks, Anton P. Nym.