I've never been able to wrap my mind around the almost universally-expressed notion that a video game should be judged via a "number of hours divided by price of purchase" Excel equation. Weird! Especially because it's simultaneously espoused that "games are art". Those two views are totally incompatible.

When "Blade Runner" came out, did people walk out of the theater assessing the film with, "Let's see, the ticket cost me $7, and the film was two hours long..." Or when people bought and acclaimed "Moby Dick" in the 19th century, did they simply evaluate the book based on the ounces of gold by the number of pages?

It's just as bizarre to look at video games like that. In fact, I'd argue that the inverse is usually true: shorter games are usually better, because that means the designers spent a lot of time in the cutting room removing what didn't work. Long games, by contrast, are almost always unnecessarily padded.

In today's money, the original "Sonic the Hedgehog" cost $111, and once learned, it takes 45 minutes to play through. Yet given the joy that game has given me, and the pure artistry of it, I would spend $300 on it today to be able to experience it again, with new eyes.