Just as games have a complex relationship with menus, so do their players. For all that they might sidetrack attention from what they’re designed to facilitate, they can be alluring in and of themselves. Metroid Prime 2’s are, from a practical point of view, fiddly and sometimes hard to understand, since options are represented by balls on the ends of lines that radiate from a central point. But they’re accessed through rotating the stick and have satisfying momentum, sub-menus smoothly swooshing in and out.

The Metal Gear Solid series’ menus are remarkably extensive and visually refined, a blend of hard-angled futuristic and Helvetica-like fonts accompanied by subtle animations and sound effects. They also contain many extra little playful details, such as full 3D models of each item in MGS4, the 3D X-ray view of Snake on MGS3’s cure screen, and the many Easter eggs, including getting Snake to vomit if you spin him around.

Similarly playful is Katamari Damacy, which casts off the convention of presenting menu options as text by having the Prince wander freely over a series of planets, the player having him walk up to a house and pressing X to load and save, a tree to view all the items collected, and a woodpecker to adjust the audio. It also offers a smooth transition into the levels themselves, which are also graphical elements on the planets’ surfaces. Along with Lego Star Wars’ Cantina hub, which also displays the spaceships formed by collecting hidden objects in the levels and characters unlocked so far, it’s an idea that echoes Super Mario 3’s overworld – presenting a richer form of interaction than flicking through abstract text choices.

Naturalizing the menu into the gameworld is a concept that games are getting increasingly sophisticated at realizing – it is, after all, what lies at the heart of the open world: it’s the interface to your game. GTA’s use of certain locations to act as functions to manage the game is now familiar to all, and now a variety of separate genres have tried using the same convention – racers Burnout Paradise and Test Drive Unlimited, and Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and Spider- Man 2 among thirdperson action games.



Criterion, with Burnout Paradise, has paid particular attention to the way its menus work, perhaps to atone for the crimes committed by Burnout 3’s interface, with online functions accessed with the D-pad through a discrete menu in the lower left area of the screen without pausing the action. It’s a design that simultaneously promotes the game’s online component and ensures that the flow of play never breaks. That flow is also never broken by the need to load or save – the game automatically saves and starts with the car you last used at the last junkyard you visited, meaning that players rarely need visit the decidedly more clunky start menu.

Eden Games’ recent Alone In The Dark, meanwhile, dispensed with a Resident Evil-style inventory in favour of its hero’s coat, with the camera diving down to give access to it in real time. But though it fits into play more smoothly and credibly than a separate menu, it highlights the problem that finding ‘real-world’ solutions to gaming problems can make the game more awkward. Burnout Paradise’s races are found at different junctions around its city, requiring a journey to access, while, in usability terms, AITD’s coat is simply not a good interface to equip, combine and administer a game’s inventory.

Such attempts at transparency are not a new idea – the flow of play in Super Mario 3 is still far smoother. Rather, it’s an art that games have had to re-learn and develop since they became so complex, and it’s something that requires a lot more learning. The fact is, few modern games can get away with eradicating options menus and game information.

The elegant solution posed by Race Driver: Grid is to make them a physical part of the world. Text for the main menu hangs as 3D objects in the atmospheric garage that forms the base for career mode; selecting options causes the camera to swoop over to a new part of the room. To manage sponsorships, it moves over to your car, with its decals immediately reflecting each change you make; to start a race event, it goes to a glass-topped case; events already won are covered by a trophy. Once on the track, driver names hover over the cars during the opening flypast of the starting grid. There’s no attempt to curb or hide away the interface here: it instead has better continuity with the game, making its appearances markedly less jarring.



And then there’s the other way of doing things: honing and perfecting the interface and menus into sublime experiences in and of themselves. Fire up an EA Sports game and you’re immediately struck by the special balance of practical usability and inspirational aestheticism at which EA is so adept. The publisher employed Schematic, a design house that worked on the computer interfaces of Minority Report, to create the branding and menu system in NBA Live 07, which features a dynamic blend of a 3D player in a floodlit hall, overlays of bold text and skewed arrays of team badges, all accompanied by carefully selected licensed music.

But it’s the Halo series that really shows what game menus can achieve. The original Halo streamlined the save/load system with the simple command ‘save and quit’: no more hunting for the save slot, easy for all. We have Halo 2 to thank for creating the party multiplayer system, a way of gathering a bunch of players that stays together through an online gaming session, as well as functions that directly inspired Xbox 360’s essential Live capabilities – seeing what friends were playing while in-game, sending party invites and initiating voice chats. And though it was complex and offered deep customization, it remained simple and flexible to use.

Halo 3 extended the party concept further, making it the basis for access to each of its five game types, even when playing alone. The effect is to make Halo 3’s online component a transparent and intrinsic part of the game, allowing remote players to join any session without the host needing to revert to a main menu and hit the multiplayer option. And though it’s even more functionally rich than Halo 2, adding custom maps, file shares and a whole lot more to the mix, it’s even easier to navigate. Halo is all the proof you need that menus need not be assimilated smoothly into the game to be a valuable component of the experience.

Halo 3 credits two people with its interface design: two people on the team dedicated to something that isn’t actually the game itself. It shows how the best developers invest much effort in the dowdily administrational sections of their productions: they know that no one wants to jump over hurdles to get to the fun part. And, certainly, they’re learning how to better present the reams of new functions and features that today’s games possess.

But whether there’s an ideal approach – whether to perfectly integrate interfaces into the game so that you never notice them, or to polish and craft them into sharply efficient systems that operate strictly outside play itself – is probably irrelevant. If they can strike that special balance between quietly serving up the game and being a pleasure to use then, whether we acknowledge them or not, they’ve achieved their goal.