Grabbing my attention

In a post, Josh Bycer discusses something he calls the "Fifteen Minutes of Game".  He talks about the "elevator pitch", in which novices in the game industry must distill the central ideas of their game down to fifteen seconds, in order to focus their thoughts and core concepts.  He then applies it to himself and games, stating that "A game has about 15 minutes for me to get into it, or the chance of me finishing the game is lessen."  His reason for this is you can usually see any major technical issues within the first 15 minutes of the game.  If they exist, they're bound to be a major issue throughout the game, thus ruining the experience.  

I find myself agreeing with parts of this.  If there is a technical issue that is obvious that early on, I find myself getting discouraged.  If the story intrigues me, I might try to fight past the issues, but otherwise I'll just pass on the game.  Another  point for me is that the story can often save a game for me.  Resonance of Fate, a JRPG I played over the summer, had a storyline that quickly captured my attention; however, the battle system within the game had an extremely steep learning curve.  Either you got it or you didn't. There was no middle ground. In my case, the interest I had in the plot drove me to push past the curve and advance through the game.