Okay, so listen. I love video games. I mean, I think it's safe to assume most of us at least know what it's like to love video games since we're members of a Final Fantasy message board.

So anyway, on top of really loving video games, something else about me is that I am pretty easygoing as far as most things go. What I'm trying to say is that I don't usually get irritated or annoyed by things easily, at least in my opinion and experience.

That said, now I can begin my story. I have a friend who always tells me how he doesn't really care for most of the Final Fantasy series because he never feels like he knows what's going on and that you're never given enough information to progress through the game on your own and have to consult a strategy guide, etc. I never really understood why he had those problems until I showed him Shadow of the Colossus a few weeks ago...

He fires up the game, chooses the new game option and starts whaling away on the start, Circle, X, Triangle, and Square buttons, skipping through the entire introduction sequence. As he plays the game, he also skips every other sequence as soon as the screen goes into wide aspect ratio like a scene is coming on. Of course, if you played this game you would know that these scenes trigger when you get close to a colossus so that the screen will pan toward where you should be going. So after skipping these he runs in the wrong direction and wonders why he doesn't know what's going on, what to do, or where to go.

It was an extremely, extremely annoying experience for me. I used to think it was a flaw if game developers left out the option to skip cutscenes so you didn't have to watch them the second time around, however, I'm starting to think making cutscenes impossible to skip is the best idea ever. Uh, I don't really know why I felt the urge to make a thread about this. I hope I'm not the only person who gets extremely frustrated over this. Any similar experiences? How do you feel about people skipping cutscenes in videogames? Do you skip cutscenes? (I'll kill you) Discuss.