Game menus aren''t part of the entertainment factor of the game. They''re there for navigation and option selection purposes only. How do you get annoyed with it exactly?

Those aren''t bugs, they''re added features

Games should have a menu of some kind. If I remember rightly Black and White liked to throw you straight into the game, really annoying since if you wanted to play a different game from what you had played last you had to quit out to the menu which did actually exist and load everything in again which took absolutely ages.

As long as the menu is fast, its the best thing we have imo. People should definitely take a lesson from warcraft 3 and never make menus like that again. Sure the scrolling animation was nice the first time, and maybe the second time, but not past the third. Especially when joining battle.net, its annoying to have to wait 30 seconds for the chat window to come up only to have to click and wait a few more times to change the room I''m in and even longer to join a game.

It would be awesome to see games include a console on the menu system (maybe make it so you have to change a value in the text config manually so only ''advanced users'' get it), so that I could just type a single(or at least very few compared to how many menus I would have to go through) to do what I want. Being able to type ''join bnet [name] [pw] [room]'' would be a lot more fun than waiting 15 minutes for the menus to scroll up and down 50 times.

Grand Theft Auto Vice City dumps you right into the game when you start. Because 99 times out of 100 you''re going to want to play your last saved game.

Does it really make sense to ask the player a question he always has the same answer to?

You can accomplish graphics and sound tweaking using an in game menu. Why would you do this before you''ve even played the game, how do you know what you''re tweaking.

I often want to or have to change settings before I play. On my Duron machine with a low-end video card, I have to change it down to 800x600 or lower and drop most of the settings before I can play.

Menus are good.

How would people play games without a menu? You need to customize controls and settings, and what happens when you want to load or save or start over? How would people do that without a menu? Poke at the screen with a stick till something happens?

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

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Original post by Icemallet

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Original post by exa_einstein
nearly EVERY commercial game today has a menu. (new/save/load/join/host/exit) isn''t it a little boring? We know that it is the most copied idea in industry and we don''t search for something better. ideas? consoles with help system? no menu, just start game immediately without any questions? I search for ideas . please help.
thanks.

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They did that in ultima ascension.

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Which also took the "everyone likes editing INI files" approach to customization. Of course, the game had worse flaws than that, but there are other games that do similar things (or at least, hide important settings behind idiotic consoles).