The failure of Gran Turismo 5: the power of menus and UI
The failure of Gran Turismo 5: the power of menus and UI

                      
                      
          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."

          
                      
                  