[quote name=\'Ian Wallis\' date=\'Jan 23 2004, 09:40 AM\'] Personally, I liked "Squares" better when the bonus round was played at the end of the show. I just don't think it works as well having a two-out-of-three format. Maybe in the old NBC days it did, but not now. [/quote]
I brought this up in another thread, but personally, I think Squares is better off with the 2/3 format. I think it allows for a better flow with the game, and sometimes we even get 2 bonus rounds in a show. Of course, there's also those days where there's none at all. ;-)
Looking at this season's episodes, it looked like for the first five years, that HSq was trying very hard to stretch out the gameplay. IMO, that makes the show tiring and boring. Watching two people play tic-tac-toe can only be fun for so long, when it's a self-contained game.
One thing I *do* like in a self-contained game is a guaranteed bonus round in every show. But there's a lot of shows where the show could get very tiring with self-contained matches, as Matt said, Lingo and HSq are good examples. Going back to the early days of Feud "straddling" in a sense, I'd like to see the current Feud producers experiment with something like that, in one of those episodes where a family gets 300 in only three rounds; instead of doing the commercial in between Fast Money, use that commercial *after* FM, and then intro the next family briefly.