Game characters talk too much. Unless, of course, they're J'zargo.

I like shirts. I enjoy owning them, wearing them -- pretty much everything you can do with shirts, really. Which is mostly just those two things. So I recently visited a custom T-shirt website, because why not? And then -- because I'm oddly proud of my exceedingly embarrassing geekiness -- I searched for Skyrim apparel. What I discovered made me laugh like a hyena that'd recently eaten a live clown. Then it made me deeply, deeply depressed. Mere days after the game had launched, there were shirts emblazoned with phrases like “You tried mercenary work? It might suit you” and “My cousin's out fighting dragons, and what do I get? Guard duty.”

If you've played Skyrim for more than two seconds, those phrases probably haunt your nightmares -- perhaps uttered by deeply unsettling images of your disapproving father as a giant praying mantis. Why? Because Skyrim's all-too-talkative denizens bellow them every time you're within bellowing range. Dovahkiin shouts? The Voice? Those are nothing compared to these all-powerful, sanity shattering sentences. And that's a rather large problem.

I love shooting things in the face. Monsters, aliens, mice, men – all are equal in the eyes of my trigger finger, which itches with such fervor that I should probably have a doctor look at it. But – even in the ammo-casing-coated world of videogames – there's a time and place for violence. (And no, smartasses in the audience, it's not “always.” Always isn't even a place.) More and more, I've noticed recent games tripping over their own feet because they choose to reign with unfaltering bloodlust instead of reining it in. In some games, it's but a speck-sized sticking point. Others, though, choose to live by the sword, only to fall flat on their faces and die by it in the most gruesome fashion imaginable.

Evidence A: Deus Ex. For the most part, it's an amazing game, but bring up its boss fights and watch as a room full of fawning admirers turns into a torch-flashing, keyboard-smashing angry mob. And why not? The game's bosses are horribly designed strategic dead ends that eat headshots and excrete pure, unfiltered sadness. To me, though, the biggest problem is that you have to fight them at all.                  

One of gaming's more recent gee-whiz-it's-probably-magic trends comes with a pretty thick string attached: your saves, your character, your mountain of collectable doodads for that precious achievement – all of them are imprisoned inside a server on a desert island or in space or something. You're playing a high-stakes game of rental roulette, and everything you've worked so hard to build could go poof in the blink of an eye. What trend am I referring to? Did you say, “cloud gaming”? Private Obvious, I'm sure your Captain is beaming with pride right now. However, while your answer's technically correct, I'm talking about MMOs.

It's interesting, too, because gamers have been largely a-okay with this aspect of MMOs for years – at least, so long as their game of choice hasn't met an untimely end. But should we be? After all, cloud gaming's certainly risky in that we don't physically own our games, but in MMOs, we don't own the experience.

Watching one of gaming's most well-known faces plummet multiple stories and impale herself on a jagged iron pipe is an uncomfortable experience, to say the least. But wait, she's not done. Nearly sobbing, she proceeds to wrench her unfortunate new appendage from her side while emitting a skin-crawling scream. And that's just the beginning.

The first time I saw the latest Tomb Raider game in action, my heart nearly exploded out of my chest – probably in an effort to escape from the carnage. The rest of my body, meanwhile, wanted nothing more than to follow it. Lara Croft was in pain. Real pain. Blinding pain. Not “Rawr, me videogame character, me shrug off bullet to face like it tiny blind kitten baby” pain. It was ugly, dirty, and downright horrific. And it wouldn't stop happening. Lara constantly fell, slipped, and survived by clawing rocks until her fingernails were bloody scraps. The demo reveled in pain, said many pundits. It was “torture porn,” sharing a straightjacket with movies like SAW and the part of our brains that loves to stare at car wrecks.

I, however, disagree completely. Not only that, I think this is something the gaming industry could use a whole lot more of. Find out why after the break.