[quote name=\'SamJ93\' post=\'170632\' date=\'Nov 27 2007, 02:29 PM\'] [quote name=\'Chuck Sutton\' post=\'170630\' date=\'Nov 27 2007, 02:57 PM\']
I do remember a couple times when the game was the United States and the flags to place were the state flags the kids won.
It seemed there the kids had memorized the state flags and were not really waiting for the name of the location to be read.
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And therein lay the major problem with the endgame--it varied too much in difficulty. Kids who were lucky enough to get the US map almost always won it in a walk. I think they changed this to include all of North America later on in the run, but it didn't help much. Meanwhile, woe unto the ones who got the Africa map and had to discern where Mauritania or Lesotho were.
As far as my favorite endgames, Scrabble Sprint is up there for me, as is the first Ceasar's Challenge format.
--Sam
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Many endgames can vary in difficulty as much as the production wants it to. It was just that Carmen's was more blatant and up-front in its difficulty than most. About the only other show where you can say "sucks to be you", before the bonus begins is Wheel of Fortune. (For $25,000 -- one word, four letters, ends with an N)
Scrabble Sprint controlled its budget by using harder clues and words with more common letters. Early on, Challenge didn't have the luxury of that control, save by changing the letter mix, and thus the need to the second bonus format. And if want to tighen the coinpurse on, say, Family Feud, just make sure the number one answers score 20-25 instead of 40-50.
For all the harping about Carmen, I think that some people (including certain Wikipedia editors) are letting their memories be clouded by what's on Youtube. The thing is, some of what's there is taken from early episodes, possibly even pilots. Those early shows, they were still tweaking the format slightly, both in the front and the end. You saw some weird stuff there, like the state flag thing (which only worked for the reason Chuck stated), and the clue reading. You even saw one round where the bonus was 60 seconds instead of 45. But this was a small portion of the shows in the very first season. After that, the format was locked in for the rest of the run, save for adding the chase and making the end game slightly harder starting in the second season.