Bad UI in Games

[Uriel]

[Nash]

Bad or good, user interface has never affected how I enjoy a game. I just adapt to it.

[Yoshi]

I like how the Office paper clip is grammatically challenged.

[Opaque]

Dead Rising on any non HD TV before the patch goes without saying.

[A Robot Bit Me]

Bad or good, user interface has never affected how I enjoy a game. I just adapt to it.

This is bizarre to me. FFIII DS's UI made a bad game good. Front Mission 1's made a good game bad.

[Nash]

This is bizarre to me. FFIII DS's UI made a bad game good. Front Mission 1's made a good game bad.

It's just not a big deal to me. Bad use interface may take a bit to figure out and get used to, but after that I don't think about it anymore.

[Cheebs]

I like how the Office paper clip is grammatically challenged.

Your pulling my leg. I don't see it.

[kedawa]

The entire interface on the PS3 is a fucking mess. There are about 10x the number of menus and options than there needs to be.

Almost every button config menu in fighting games is done wrong. Capcom got it right in Street Fighter II for SNES almost two decades ago, and yet there are still games, SF games no less, that get it wrong.

I played some game recently, although for the life of me I can't remember what it was, where at start-up there wais a prompt about saving that needed a yes/no response, but I couldn't tell which one was highlighted because the question was in red text, 'yes' was white, 'no' was yellow, and pressing up or down always swapped the colours between 'yes' and 'no'. The selector should have been bound so that when the bottom option is selected, pressing down does nothing, and when the top option is selected, pressing up does nothing. Instead I had to guess and move on to the next menu, which had more options, to find out that yellow is selected and white is not.

[MechDeus]

I played some game recently, although for the life of me I can't remember what it was, where at start-up there wais a prompt about saving that needed a yes/no response, but I couldn't tell which one was highlighted because the question was in red text, 'yes' was white, 'no' was yellow, and pressing up or down always swapped the colours between 'yes' and 'no'. The selector should have been bound so that when the bottom option is selected, pressing down does nothing, and when the top option is selected, pressing up does nothing. Instead I had to guess and move on to the next menu, which had more options, to find out that yellow is selected and white is not.

I have played tons of games with this. A simple box highlight, outside letter glow only on the chosen item, or any of a million things could easily make the selection obvious, but instead developers love to make two selections two vague colors with no way to tell which is currently chosen. I fucking hate that shit.

[Compass]

I love that one.

Another old favorite that still pops up today is when the title screen defaults to New Game over Continue or Load. Yes, let's default to the option you will choose ONCE over the alternative you will choose 10, 50, or 100 times.

Capy's recent M&M: Clash of Heroes riffs on this technique. Those tricky puzzles that are designed for experimentation and trial-and-error?

-No way to undo a move.
-No way to give up and try again without using up all remaining moves, watching battle animations, "Defeat" text animation, and even after that two or three seconds of... nothing, before you're allowed access to the Retry prompt.
-... which defaults to "No"!

Particularly horrifying because on PS3 selecting it by accident earns you a solid twenty+ seconds of loading before you'd be back to the puzzle.