A Review of Every Console Menu (For Some Reason)

okay so i had a long introduction for this video but i'm just gonna cut it out i'm talking about console menus i'm gonna rate them on a five star system with half stars and it's a ten point system five stars okay you get the point we're going on now [Music] philip cdi now don't quote me on this but it seems that this is the first console menu i mean it would make sense because there's no need for a menu if you don't have a cd drive if all the information is stored on a cartridge then all the saves are managed there and yeah this menu is pretty uh it looks a little simple i don't love the flat powerpoint-esque gradients in the background each version of the philips cdi seems to have a different menu it's kind of hard to put a rating on it for the 100 i'll give it a two out of five i mean because there's not a whole lot there the 200 that's a solid three out of five yeah it's a little boring but decently charming [Music] [Applause] okay so the 3do's menu does not look good not at all in fact i would say this is a perfect example of how to make a bad interface static gradients all around this odd rock jpeg background the bouncing animation is just such a low frame rate and everything has shadows it's obvious what they were trying to do take advantage of the features of the 3do against the competition but yeah no this doesn't work [Music] one out of five [Music] next we have the sega saturn and this one i'm actually quite fond of particularly the font normally in a professional work setting fun fonts just don't fly most interfaces are designed to be practical especially on game consoles it was hard to manage fun and practicality but i think this works now you might notice that this isn't using vectors where text can scale indefinitely so it looks a little pixelated but that adds to its charm the real fun is here in the cd menu yeah remember that this is sega's space era so you have this mildly detailed chip that's like a visualizer i love these low poly spheres that bleep and bloop to the music with the orbiting balls and this was definitely a tech demo supposed to show off what your new sega saturn was capable of i really like this one four out of five remember this isn't for practicality and there's not a whole lot you're going to be doing with these game menus [Music] the fat ps1s had a different menu than the slim models the early one came in the mid 90s and it shows the paint splotches the caps locked text that makes it feel like it was ripped off a hawaiian punch ad in these blue bubbles that sony just seems to love one question i always have is how do these brands decide what color to pick i mean like sega's blue and sonic's blue and nintendo's red cause mario's red xbox is green and playstation just kind of took blue from sega i think during this era the association was a bit closer with gray but yeah it makes you think whether that blue background had any influence on what would come later different variations of this menu exist based on different models but it just seems to be different colors of paint nothing too noticeable one thing i never love in a menu is a static background i think it feels a bit cheap it just seems a bit cheesy granted in this day using precious memory to store multiple images and video probably not the best idea but still gotta not get a few points for it the cd player menu is actually a downgrade from the saturn at least visually the ps1 the the slim that's a different story gotta say even though i grew up with this box the menus just always felt a bit boring it feels like sony just said okay we're serious now and you got the 2000s minimalist style the cursor is definitely out of place here i'm sorry ps1 and not the best 3.5 out of 5 for both of them oh boy the 64 didn't have a menu there was no memory cards and no cd player functionality the disk drive had a menu but it was mostly to change the clock settings while mario running around back there looks pretty rad i don't really consider this a menu i mean do you i give this a mario out of 64. [Music] finally we get to the next generation the old dreamcast this is probably the first menu that i would have loved to see pop up every time you put in a game and there was an auto start function which i assumed would let you boot straight into the menu but going through the web it seems like yeah it was just if you were already in the menu and put a disk in it would immediately boot the disk i always kind of assumed my dream cast just wasn't working or something but yeah the menu looks great not only is the background animated which is kind of a first here the icons themselves jiggle around look at them go to me this has always been peak sega aesthetic it's bright and colorful and the font looks perfect the cd player isn't quite as creative as before but yeah what are you gonna do for the most part this is a real chill menu it looks soft and wiggly 4.5 out of five uh yup gotta a clap for that one next up okay yeah a lot of people have strong feelings towards the ps2 they probably have a lot of strong feelings towards every machine i'm going to talk about after this point and so i may say some upsetting things personally with the ps2 menu i don't look back on it fondly gasp yes the startup is cool and the simplicity of this screen is great well animated background the font is fine and it's pretty dark so it's not you know lighting up the room but beyond that the memory card file manager the cd player i just i i don't love this it feels like an updated version of the ps1 menu just slightly darker it's mostly just static gradients that might transition into some other static gradients and there's a few polygons floating around i'm surprised how downgraded many of the cd player uis have become i mean i guess by the late 90s it was far less exciting to have a cd but come on it's like they have a dark mode and a light mode that changes based on the menu at hand and i'm just not a fan of any of this two out of five i'm sorry okay now onto the big green box remember how i was talking about colors for brands well according to seamus blackley co-creator of the xbox the reasoning for this green whole aesthetic was because the artist in charge had a bunch of fancy markers and co-workers liked them so they stole them all except for this this color of green so he drew the xbox logo and i guess they stuck with that now depending on who you are the fact that the entire menu is green it's either disgusting or nostalgic it's hard to deny that the early 2000s had a lot of this particular color toxic green this is the matrix it's it's it's a matrix menu discounting the color which you know take it or leave it depending on the day i think this is actually a really good looking menu you gotta think the og xbox had a hard drive so storing a more detailed ui that wasn't much of a problem everything is animated foreground elements background elements sound effects are i will always think of halo 2 or pgr when i hear these noises i love the font the font is pretty much what i use in every video still it's just the best font what really sells this for me is the transitions i mean just look at that everything's so smooth and futuristic if that playstation 1 menu was the 90s then this is the 2000s i like it you know what i'm going to do a 4.5 out of 5. you lost 0.5 because everything is too green [Music] oh boy the purple lunchbox i haven't actually seen the menu for this in a good few years and looking at it now wow this this is this is pretty good everything is a cube the text is a cube it's fairly minimalistic which i think works in its favor the background isn't dynamic but it's also just pitch black i think this is a good thing this is something that a lot of menus can learn from today do not give me dark gray don't give me light gray just give me darkness everything's centered in well the center of the screen for what it does it does it very well and i can't think of a menu more distinct than this one of course the the sounds the ambient noises and the bleeps and the bloops i'm giving this a 5 out of 5. the ds yeah i have a lot of nostalgia for it and part of that is because it's the first device i had that you could boot into the menu before the game was inserted you could have your name you could have your favorite color what a world it's simple it's it's clean i like the fact that you have the ds card up here and the gba at the bottom just like they they are you know on the the thing the grid layout is something i never even thought about as a kid but yeah i guess it's better than a plain background the icons look simple and intentionally pixelated which adds charm the sound effects are well if you grew up with them what else can i say no ambient music in the background is a bit disappointing but you know it's a handheld while personally it's still one of my favorites i feel like if you didn't grow up with it you might not look back on this with as much nostalgia uh just hurts to say because i want to give it a 5 but realistically 3.4 3.5 a 4 out of 5. i'll give it a i'll give it a 4 out of 5. [Music] next up i'll do the ps3 and the psp yeah it's not chronological order but that might make more sense in a bit so these used the x-cross media bar this was the consistent ui sony was pushing for many of its devices at the time tvs had it the psx dvr system had it they seemed to really like this and to be fair i i like it too out of the 7th gen user interfaces i think this one has aged the best a lot of this is because of the simple icons the flat ui and that wavy background i always enjoyed how many options there were here because you could just dig through it all and never know what you're gonna find but this isn't about practicality you could have quite a lot of customization though here with the custom picks and the custom music now one issue i have even though it makes sense is the lack of ambient music it makes the ui feel a bit too sterile and clean for a game console but i assume that's what they were going for i gotta imagine that sony was pretty proud of this and probably expected it to be in use for well longer than it was i don't love the idea of music blaring every time i have my cursor on a title even to this day playstation still does this and i've never been a fan overall i still gotta give it a 4 out of 5. yeah so the wii menu there's a few things i'll have to address here first off using the wiimote to navigate the menu is a pain while in any other case i would consider this a practicality issue the problem is the menu is designed exclusively around this while it's probably the best you could expect for this kind of controller the controller still it's a webo but for the good there's a lot of good the standard wii menu music that's great the jingles that play before you open an app see i like this here because you have to confirm the selection first rather than just having a random song play if you leave it on the ability to organize the menu to place icons where you want them to be that's actually pretty special however the problems of a static background it is nice that many of the app icons are animated so it makes it look a bit better nostalgia aside this is a fine serviceable menu especially considering the controller it's a downgrade from the gamecube but there's enough charm for me to still enjoy this i'd give it a 3.5 out of 5. mostly because the wiimote brings it down a lot of points the dsi it's fine it scrolls sideways radians are a bit iffy no dynamic background is kind of weird it's not as clean as the ds but having more features will you know it'll do that i guess three out of five you know it's the wrong generation but i think i'll just skip to the 3ds here because the xbox is that's long that we'll get to that the 3ds it evolved over time at the beginning it was really simple and probably would have scored quite a bit lower i've always loved the 3d gimmick though having the icon on top spin like that it's a treat the bottom can either be rows of single icons or a full wii menu-esque system options for customization with color and dark mode and themes that all made this pretty nice while i might not have as much nostalgia for this as the ogds i gotta admit this is really good 4.5 out of five [Music] okay it's the big one it's the x-bow 360. there was a lot of revisions of the dashboard and i'm sure everybody has their favorites the most nostalgic and i've never been a fan of the blades the backgrounds are slightly dynamic and bright which is good but the overabundance of gradients will always annoy me during this era some menus started having skeuomorphism like the old ios versions the feeling of something being real and digital this means more shadows more gradients and for me it just always felt a bit cheap i was never a fan of stuff like this text just floating here either and i consider this a downgrade over the og xbox 2.5 no no that that's harsh i'll give it a 3 out of 5. next up the new xbox experience yeah this one i do have a lot of nostalgia for but i do think it looks better the fonts seem to have been maybe fixed or maybe it's the fact the text isn't just black the vertical sliding gives a lot of room for custom backgrounds which also is a plus having your avatar front and center gives some incentive for you know you to use them the shadows and gradients remain which works better than it did before but it's still not ideal i'll give this one a i want to say four out of five but that's definitely nostalgia still four out of five i can't go any lower now i really don't think i need to discuss the sub menus here sub menus is the stuff that happens when you press the xbox icon or a playstation button most of these are really simple and there's not anything too amazing or too awful here i don't feel like rating each and every one just because well that's kind of boring however the new xbox experience sub menu is interesting this is because it's it's just a shrunken down version of the blades menu and i mean that's that's kind of fun right okay so on to one i completely forgot about in fact i forgot about it so much that i forgot to put it in the script the difference between this and the new xbox experience is pretty subtle but i just do not like this the text is way too close together everything feels cramped the incredibly flat icons feel weird with all the gradients and the sort of 3d dynamic they were going for it's not completely 2d and it's not completely 3d 3.5 out of 5. after this it goes downhill fast and for one major reason okay maybe a few reasons but there's one big one microsoft started putting ads in the front page of the ui and this that's a deal breaker for me i mean imagine if you booted up your pc and you just got a giant doritos ad right there well this is what the 360 had become in fact this is what a lot of the xbox menus would become this was a part of the metro ui the windows 8 sort of deal no matter what you do no matter where you go you'll get ads for cars or mountain dew the menu is intentionally designed to get you to see as many ads as possible you have to go through literal pages of ads to get to the games section and don't forget that zoomed marketplace in a bing tab this is an absolute piece of trash you get a point five out of five and i'm just gonna i'm just gonna go on straight to the xbox one the first menu is not nearly as bad as the 360s at least a majority of the space is not ads the flat ui is kind of a bit too flat in the random shapes era of windows has never been appealing to me making the selection options avoid a dedicated being button is also pretty nice the point of all this is to have the most important stuff be in bigger cubes but honestly there's better ways to do that being able to pick your own color is nice but again there's ads now again with with the ads i gotta i gotta place it pretty low you get a two you get a two out of five one point five to two somewhere in there the next iteration of this is better your most recent game is front and center and the ads aren't off to the side this time it kind of makes the custom backgrounds a little less useful but now that you could have used that ad space for a few more recent apps in the fact that they didn't they didn't just put a few more over there that'll always piss me off the store is now divided with a community tab in the middle which to be honest i've never cared for it just makes the dashboard look extra messy two out of five uh sorry here xbox lives major nelson i'm here today with the third revision was i mean we have more space for recent apps there's still a bunch of ads and we have the mixer tab up there wonder how that'll turn out custom backgrounds and colors can shine a bit more here but yeah it's still not great it's acceptable but again those ads really do ruin it 2.5 out of 5 just because of what it could have been okay that was that's a long section kind of skipped a generation in there so let's let's take a let's go back the ps vita okay so i'm divided on this one for one the menu music and the bubbles are i i love this i mean this is some really top-notch menu music but everything outside of that is uh i've always felt that this is just cobbled together with a bunch of different design philosophies and you have the static backgrounds in the gradients over here you have the skeuomorphism and nothing feels consistent here overall i give it a lot of credit for the music the bubbles look nice in the effects when they move give it a jiggly almost sega feel 3.5 out of 5. [Music] okay i'm not sure how to feel about this one to be completely honest it never sticks in my mind i had to look up what the ps4 menu looked like because i just couldn't remember and that's kind of a shame honestly because it has a lot going for it the moving background is nice the ambient music is nice and the transitions between menus are not nice this is very sluggish and to be honest this kind of goes for all 8-gen menus i've just never felt like these were particularly quick but the ps4 always felt really slow the storefront fills me with fear because it crashes so often so visually i can't help but feel disdain having two separate x-axis menus it's not that any of these are confusing but i feel like this could have been done maybe a bit better in an age where many people just buy games digitally it makes sense that things will get crowded but didn't the wii solve this a long time ago i don't know the real winner though is customization here the themes are great in the fact that the best themes can change music and the icons there's a lot of good here and there's a lot of bad and i think the good at least outweighs the bad so 3.5 out of 5. oh yeah we have the wii u the wii u's menu is uh it's not not the best my biggest problem in here lies with the fact that the miiverse is shoved in your face every time you turn it on and it means that playing without a gamepad is pretty much a no-go i just don't get it why do you need the gamepad it's not quite as memorable as the wii but it still has some decent nintendo charm the heavy use of gradients is wearing thin gotta keep in mind this is still 2012 or so but i feel the 3ds did this a lot better i'll give this one a i don't know i'd i'll give it a 3 out of 5. okay the switch probably the simplest ui of all here and honestly it's good i think it's really good you got a few icons on the bottom you got light mode or dark mode and you got just your games on this flat x-axis there's not as much customization as other menus but it is clean my biggest complaint here will always be the fact that dark mode isn't a true black and that has always irritated me i'll give it a four out of five and i think that's just because it's so clean and it's so inoffensive but you lose a point for that dark mode issue also where's the menu music [Music] okay finally we get to the new consoles the series x which is also a menu for the one consoles and the series s most of the screen is recent apps and that is really nice there's a lot of background space here uh it's a lot less cluttered overall and so this makes dynamic moving backgrounds which are also new a really nice touch i know that practicality doesn't matter here but the fact that menus open much faster does give this a few good graces in my heart this is definitely the best xbox uh modern ui at least post metro the biggest fault here is well besides the ads is the fact that dark mode still doesn't turn the background completely black it's an odd gray it's definitely come a long way since the early xbox one days in design wise i always felt like something was off with the xbox one menus if the two spots on the bottom were for more recent apps or a store or a settings and not not ads well this would probably get a solid 4.525 out of 5. but it doesn't so i don't three out of five get rid of the ads finally we get the ps5 this is not good really i mean this is this is a bad menu having the explore tab pop up right there seems pretty close to an ad in my book you're constantly bombarded with news in games and the only way to get out of this is to unfollow the games like unfollow every game also i see we have the xbox style pages with the media section over here that's fine honestly a lot of this is just okay the icons are flat the store is fast but everything's fast the menu does flow much better from window to window and it feels a lot less obvious that there isn't a transition everywhere but that lack of customization that hurts this reminds me far more of a smart tv interface rather than a console this looks like a roku tv there's a lot of wasted space here i like the app collections for games and media that's fine but so much is wrong with this menu i don't understand how they could have [ __ ] this up so badly no customization plus the explore page plus the news feeds i'm going to give this a 3 out of 5. [Music] you

Channel: Whimsu

Views: 507,087

Keywords: game console, console menu, CDI, 3DO, Nintendo, Sega, Xbox, Sony, PlayStation, PSOne, PSX, PS2, PS3, PS4, PS5, PSVita, N6DD, Game console menu, DS, DSi, 3DS, Switch, Wii, Wii U, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Metro UI, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, Switch Lite, Switch OLED, PSP, Vita, Philips CDI, Panasonic 3DO, Nintendo Gamecube, Gamecube, Gamecube menu, Xbox menu, PlayStation menu, Nintendo menu, Switch menu, Dashboard, Home Menu, Whimsu, Whimsu review, review, rating, deep dive, Games

Id: C2RhS-MfLjo

Length: 28min 5sec (1685 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021