kelbear

It's a shorthand for "Bad shit happened, time for <insert game here>".

It can be done well, it can be done poorly. It's simply a framing device. Heck, you could remove all guns from military shooters and replace them with soapy bubbles which you blow at amorphous blobs to make the blobs transform into flowers. It'd be confusing, but it'd still be fundamentally shooting target to apply an effect. But framing it as guns and terrorists is a shorthand to allow the audience to understand immediately: "Take this, shoot that." The crazy bubbles and blob-flower setup is surreal and confusing, the military shooter is not.

With respect to the dead girlfriend/wife thing, it's just setting up the conflict for the player. Good games will do a better job of making you give a damn when they run a giant sword through your love interest and set them afloat on an underground river. Other games will screw it up and leave you unsatisfied. It's a matter of execution, the dead love interest will continue to be a plot driving mechanic for centuries since it's so simple to grasp.

I gamefly every game I don't see myself playing over a long period of time or coming back to. So I really only buy a handful of games anyway, and never bother to trade those.

Jeezus CHRIST that's expensive cereal!! That stuff would be about $4.50 at regular prices in New Jersey, USA.

Apparently General Mills thinks Lucky Charms are haute cuisine in Europe.

He's just a troll. Completely lacking in wit or insight. You could switch out his posts with any random 14yr old on the internet with none the wiser.

I have a ps3 that plays ps2 games, what jrpgs are there for those systems that are good and have either a lower difficulty setting or very little grind.  For what it worth one of my favorite series is kingdom hearts and I preferred Crisis Core to FF7

I think they don't like doing video reviews because it's difficult to organize. The reviewer needs to write the review as they play the game! If they want to say something and show video of it, they need to save nearby it, and duplicate the event (especially annoying if attempting to show gamebreaking but inconsistent bugs). They haven't even formed a complete opinion, but need to save up spots for the video review. Then they need to get out the recording equipment, and play through each of those sequences again to match the completed review notes. Kind of a pain in the ass. Might not be as bad for a big site like Gametrailers where the reviewers must have their own individual sets of recording equipment and just editing down later. But it's a bit much for a small site like GB. 

Sub only ER is cool with me.  I'm not that interested in happy hour or thursday night throwdown archives, but endurance runs? I'd subscribe in a heartbeat.  
 
It should be a game that has been released so long ago that everybody who wanted to play has already played it. Weird as hell, and plot-heavy for discussion material. It'd need to be obscure so that most viewers have never played it. Or ideally, games that are too long for most people to get into on their own (which is how the ER was born). Something like Anachronox? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anachronox

I'd play a game with a predefined story arc, starring a gay character. I wouldn't play an RPG as a gay character. 
 
For games with a defined story arc, I want to play it the way it's meant to be played. 
 For games where you choose your own adventure, I've only got time to play it once, and I'm going to make the choices that resonate with me the best.  
 
For the former, I'm seeing what is happening to the character, for the latter I'm projecting myself onto the character. Different approaches to how I'd play it. 

Go play Bastion. Fits all the requirements except it doesn't have many cutscenes.  
 
There's some real stinkers on that list by the way. Could easily shorten that by a dozen games at least.