Compulsion Review System

Back in the early 2000's, there was a game review website Old Man Murray that was all about snarky reviews on games that got strong reviews elsewhere - sort of like Zero Punctuation.  One of the very novel things that came out of it was the Crate Review System, where a game would be judged by how long it took to get to the first crate because after that point, "the designer has run out of ideas" according to the article.  This review system is a joke (but still something interesting to think about when playing games), but I've just developed my own review system that works along similar lines.  I'm now going to start judging games based on how long I play until my need to finish a game overrides my need to do everything in a game.  I call it, the Compulsion Review System.

In a perfectly designed game, I should still be having fun when I finish completing all the side quests/gathering all the collectibles so that I can finish the game and have both compulsions happy at the end.  When doing all the side things in a games starts being work and stops being fun or when parts of the game start frustrating me enough that my need to finish the game gets stronger, the game has over stayed its welcome.  Now, my need to gotta catch 'em all is pretty darn strong, so I don't know the conversion rate between happy Erics and happy *insert name here*s.  Meaning, this review system doesn't work that well for me to tell other people how good a game is.  That is, unless the game is so bad that the compulsion is overridden near the beginning of the game.  That means that the collecting is so boring, the mechanics are so broken, or the difficulty level is so high that I just don't care anymore.

It's also possible for the need to finish the game compulsion to get ignored, but that takes a truly terrible game.  Either that or I just got distracted by a game I had been looking forward to for a long time.  But even then, the game will be sitting on my shelf mocking me for having not beaten it, so that's an extremely rare thing.  And this is how you use your own personal crazy to work for you instead of against you.  The more you know....