If menus distract you from enjoying a game, you've got some problems.

A reader wrote that comment in response to our Gran Turismo 5 review. GT5 is indeed a game that suffers from some terrible user interface issues. What was striking about the comment is how little we tend to think about a game's menu and user interface until it fails. The front end of a game sets the stage for the game we're going to play. Were we wrong for being so harsh about menus that fail the player? Absolutely not.

Imagine a restaurant where you wait for your table in a dirty room. The hostess is rude to you, and the process of ordering food or even getting a reservation is confusing. You're having a bad experience well before you're eating, and now the chef is going to have to work much harder to satisfy a grumpy customer. Like all metaphors, this is imperfect, but the lesson remains: a great game is a great experience, and the interface is a large part of creating that experience.

What went wrong with Gran Turismo 5?

"What makes the UI so frustrating is the absolutely abysmal amount of clicking needed to get anything done," JStymie wrote in the comments. We're going to quote him at length because reading about the madness is almost as bad as going through it in the game; his experiences show just how badly the menus and interface needed to be tightened up.

After finishing the first three circuits, I head to the fourth, a Lightweight race. I try to join, and see that my current car does not qualify. I get an option to check my garage, but nothing in there qualifies either. So I see on the menu for this race, there is a "Requirements" button. I click it, expecting to be given a weight limit (and perhaps region limit). What do I get instead? A list of perhaps 25 cars. Now, if you could go through this list, click on the cars to see their stats and get a link to the Dealership for that car, OK, that'd work. Of course, this is GT5, and we have to make things hard. All you can do is see the list. So now you have to back out of the racing menu (again, at least 4-5 button presses and some loading), then load the dealership, and hope you remembered all of the Makes / Models / years / trims. Ultimately, to look through all the cars on the list, I wound up bouncing back and forth from the Dealership to the racing menu three times. To be fair, the 5th circuit also had limitations and gave you specifics—cars must be from region X and prior to Date Y. However, after spending some time going through all the dealerships for Region X, I found that currently no cars were available prior to Date Y. Thanks, GT5. Thanks.

"To be totally honest, it does affect the game," another reader complained. "I loved the racing, but every time I cross the finish line I loathe the fact that I'm about to be stuck using the menus. It's like waiting in line for a roller coaster. You're just forced to d*ck around a while for a brief amount of fun."

Animations you can't skip, long loading times, and too many button presses and menus to navigate before you can actually race... all these things add up to a frustrating and inefficient menu system. This may not be enough to kill the game—reviews and sales seem to be mostly positive so far, but you should never feel frustrated or kept away from the gameplay by the interface. If you quit your session because you don't feel like wrestling with the menus before the next race, the game has failed.

So who does it well?

An example of a great menu system is Call of Duty: Black Ops. The game begins with the protagonist staring at a computer screen that doubles as the main menu. The room he's in is also the first environment in the game, and you can look around and gain information about your surroundings. It's simple, easy to use, and helps build tension while giving you data about the game world and the position you're in. The act of including the menu system into the game world itself works very well, and takes away the feeling of playing a video game; everything is internally consistent. It even goes a bit deeper with secrets and Easter Eggs integrated into the game world via the menu.

After asking people about menus they love via Twitter, one game was mentioned time and time again: Halo: Reach. It's a menu that is rarely thought about, but isn't that a good thing? Minimal text on the edges of the screen giving you the options, offset by large, striking pieces of art. Another great example of this approach was Metroid Prime: a game with very simple text over strong imagery and music.

Dead Space is also an interesting example, because once the game begins, the menus and options also exist within the game's world. The menus are projected from the protagonist's suit, and he physically turns his head to look at them. Another design decision was to make the time you spend looking at menus exist in the game-time; you can be attacked when you're managing things. This 3D, projected aesthetic exists through all the game's menus and the user interface.

When people talk about Dance Central for the 360, the menus and the method of interaction with them via the Kinect are discussed almost as often as the gameplay. Harmonix created something in the interface that works better than Microsoft's own solutions, and that wasn't an accident; the menus were the focus of a great deal of work and effort. It paid off, and the game is better because of it.

What did we learn?

None of these games have the complexity or numerous options of Gran Turismo 5, but that only makes the menu system more important, not more forgivable. A game's menus and interface should get you to where you want to go in the least amount of time possible, with the fewest number of button presses. Not only should data be delivered to the player, but it needs to be presented in a way that is easily understandable and aesthetically pleasing. This isn't easy to do; games with the budget and production schedule of Gran Turismo 5 need to make the entire experience enjoyable, not just the gameplay itself.