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(I was going to make this a generic thread about any games with annoying menus, but as I was typing it I noticed that burnout was guilty of all the things I was going to talk about so I just made it about BO:Revenge instead.)
I've been playing Burnout Revenge the last few days and it's menus arent very good. It's doesn't have the worst menus I've seen but it does have alot of small things wrong with it. I'd like to point out that these problems might seem silly and umimportant but after playing the game 10 hours or more you notice them more and more and you don't want to spend another second sorting through the menus, you just want to race.
First of all, there's no single race mode. If you just want a regular race you have to go to career mode, choose a rank and dig through all diferent kinds of game modes to find the specific kind of race you want. Multiplayer isnt so bad about this so you can always buy a friend or two to enable that mode.
Multiplayer isnt exactly flawless though, It gives you a nice simple list of race and crash modes, but every time you do a race you get sent back to the main menu, where you have to goto multiplayer again, the other players each have to press start on their controllers so you're always waiting on the guy pickin his nose to hit the damn button, you gotta select the race type again, and finally select your cars. Now, this takes about a minute(unless he's got a nice booger up there), and an average crash battle takes about 30 seconds so you're spending twice the amount of time working the menu as you are controlling your vehicle. It'd be so much faster if after a race it took you right back to the select track screen, or even better if it gave an option to goto a random track straight from the last one.
There's some really cool races in the game, and there's no doubt that you'll want to go back and play your favorite one with friends. Well, goodluck finding it. There's something like 80 different crash locations but they're sorted by names like "Streetcar Set on Fire" and "Mount Crushmore" and there's no mini-screenshots of the locations to give you any idea which course you'll actually be playing. So if you like a location, write it's name down because if you don't you'll never find it again.
I seem to talk about crash mode alot, probably because I have the attention span of a flea and they're fast, but there's one more thing annoying about crash mode. When you screw up(I do alot) and hit retry the camera goes in reverse all the way from where you wrecked back to the start and causes and extra 20second wait just to retry a wreck that doesnt take 20 seconds to do in the first place.
Another thing is the auto-save feature, sure almost all games do it but it's still annoying as hell racing for only 2 minutes and adding 30 seconds of saving on top of the already tedious menu system. No one needs to auto save after every race. Why can't autosave disable itself for 20 minutes before autosaving again. If you gotta quit sometime between the autosaves, do it manually, it takes about 2 seconds longer than an autosave but saves alot more time than that in the long run.
Now, I think Burnout Revenge is a great game but the races are short and cant even be increased. A 2 lap race takes less than 3 minutes on most tracks, if it could be increased to 5-10 laps I probably wouldn't even notice the time it takes to navigate the menu. A roadrage race to 10 takedowns is almost instant on multiplayer, so restarting it over and over it annoying, especially if you want to play a different board.
Like I said at the start of the thread, the menus aren't the worst. The thing is that they do ALOT of very tiny annoyances that just make the menu system tedious.
Well.. back to playing..
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“It is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick” - Dave Barry
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