And yet console games have an uneasy relationship with menus and option screens. PC games have always had them in spades, surely a nod to the tinkering nature of their traditional users, but pre-PS1 console games would routinely offer only the barest systems.

Many of Nintendo’s NES classics had nothing beyond the choice of a one- or two player game and a pause screen. Even when things started getting complex, such as when Super Mario 3 allowed players to take their own route through its levels, it elegantly sidestepped the mundanity of level select screens by having Mario walk through a map of the Mushroom Kingdom. It was a conscious refusal to take on any element that distracts from the game itself: if the idea of a console game is about plug and play, then menus are surely anathema.

But it wasn’t always to be. By Super Mario 64, which provides level selects, save management and an options menu, it was clear that an entirely streamlined approach had become impracticable. Console games were becoming more complex, their structures less linear, their mechanics and controls more extensive, and players were beginning to expect the option to switch music off or change button configurations. Perhaps that’s why console game menus are so often awkwardly incorporated into play.



Resident Evil’s inventory screen is a case in point. Styled as if it were some high-tech piece of STARS equipment, it sits somewhere between being an integral part of the game like Civilization’s city administration screens, because it’s where you manage the inventories of Chris and Jill, and being an obstacle to it. Apart from supporting various incongruous actions that would otherwise be carried out in real time, such as gun reloading, the need to continually switch in and out of the screen to equip weapons and use items breaks the flow of play. Even Resident Evil 4, which cast off so many of the series’ irksome conventions, didn’t manage to get rid of it.

And then there’s Metal Gear Solid. As it happens, neither MGS nor MGS2 feature in-game menus. MGS smartly integrated the inventory into play by using two cycling menus mapped to the lower shoulder buttons and a codec-based save system, a feature that has persisted right through to MGS4.

But MGS3 added various new features, ostensibly to give a credible impression of survival in a hostile environment – inventory loadouts (based on the weight of equipment), wound treatment and camouflage. Without spare buttons to handle the controls for such mechanics, they all require visiting the in-game menu. With the need to change camouflage extremely frequent, it meant that at those moments when the tension was highest players had to pause the action to look for a menu option. That it shared a menu with a game settings option was similarly odd – you might have assumed that a game asking you to ensnare the local wildlife to keep your character’s stamina up and cure his ailments would do all it could to conceal the nuts and bolts that were behind it all.