Who in the world okay’ed this kind of thing…? December 5, 2010

In case you didn’t know, UI stands for user interface (wiki definition). Generally designers are supposed to make the UI of their product user friendly, but apparently the makers of GT5 thought otherwise…

This is the main menu for the 1 player mode. Note the different sized rectangles in the center screen in a non-intuitive layout. Also note the absence of well defined borders of each picture, resulting in a confusing slab of pictures. Thirdly, note the small font of the words in each rectangle. Whoever designed this menu definitely prioritized style over usability, which in itself is not a completely bad idea, but is quite annoying to get used to.

This is the menu for special events. Note how each section is the same size and the same format, definitely better than the last one. One little thing to note is the black lettering with deep red background in the first column, which makes it harder to read compared to the rest of the columns.

This is the menu for selecting a car in arcade mode, which probably has the worst design in the entire game. There is a scrollable list at the bottom of the screen for selecting cars. For some reason, someone thought it was a good idea to put all the cars into one long list, sorted by horsepower. So if someone wanted to choose a car with high horsepower, they would have to scroll all the way to the end. This design also makes it extremely difficult to find a specific car. Say you wanted to select a mini cooper. You would have to remember the horsepower of it and scroll all the way to the general range in the list and go through the cars one by one to find it. Another huge problem is that the cars don’t load fast enough when you’re scrolling through the list. Therefore, you would have to wait for the cars to load as you are scrolling or else they would appear blank in the list.

Not to say that this is a horrible game, but whoever designed the menus should really rethink their priorities.

On another note, the opening movie was quite awesome, although I personally would have liked them to redraw more cars instead of spending time on the movie. WHERE IS MY ROCKET BOOSTER BOX IN HD!!!!????

Note: the above is just a rant, don’t take it too seriously. Lol.