Getting in the game

[alexxkay]

There's a game that I've been playing lately on the Xbox 360. It's a good game, once you get started -- but getting started takes way more effort than it should. Here are the steps, *not* counting the time spent in the XBox-xpecific parts of the process:

* Game executable starts running.
* Attract video automatically loads, taking several seconds. Once it has loaded, you can press Start to cancel out of it.
* "Press Start" screen loads, taking a few more seconds before it will actually register you pressing Start.
* Main Menu comes up. "New Game" is always selected. If you want to "Load game", you have to scroll down one, then press A.
* You now must select a storage device and press A. In my configuration, the default is correct, so I just need to press A.
* Now you select a specific Save Game to load. Again, I just have to press A.
* A prompt comes up "Confirm Load?" "No" is selected, so you have to scroll to "Yes", then press A.
* A screen comes up explaining the autosave icon. You need to press A to dismiss it.
* Finally, after *9* button presses, actual gameplay starts to load. Although, in this game, the initial gameplay is always a space that is not much more than a 3-d navigable menu in which you can select what mission you want to play next...

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Sadly this sounds like 90% of the PS/2 games I've played. GT3, for all its driving-game experience wonderousness, has a huge button count for navigating between screens like that...

Of course you'd hope designers would have learned something since 2002, but, oh well.