The Race Day menu in Need for Speed ProStreet.
Been meaning to post about this forever now, but this might just be one of the most notorious cases of confusing UI I have ever had in a video game. Full disclosure though, this screenshot is from the PS3 version.
That said, quick introduction here, in this screenshot, I completed the Battle Machine event and the 2 events I unlocked were the one with the skull above it and whatever the round part is below it. So what's the problem exactly? The problem is the color separation between what's unlocked and what isn't is just
bad. While with the "skull event", you can kind of see the events above it aren't unlocked yet and you can easily tell I already beat "Battle Machine" since it's green, the one below it however blends in a bit too well with the other events around it, making it hard to tell what's unlocked, what isn't and what you can actually select.
There were
many things that confused me and drew me away from ProStreet when it came out, but this was the single biggest reason I didn't get into it right away. Although I may understand it now, this menu was
extremely confusing to me back when I first got the game on PS2 in 2007. Since the color separation was so bad, I couldn't tell what could be selected and what couldn't and sometimes found myself unintentionally playing Battle Machine again out of sheer confusion. Considering this was the PS2 version, the menu was obviously blurrier than the PS3 screenshot you see here, and the crappy TV I had at the time and whatever brightness settings I was using probably didn't help either.
ProStreet as a whole I think did alright with every other menu it did in the game,
except this one. This one I think just focuses too much on trying to look good and less on being intuitive and easy to understand and the bad color separation certainly doesn't help. This can be confusing to people who are new to the game, much like it was for me at first. Maybe I was just being a little dumb when I first played it and I'm sure it could be even worse, but still, it's not good and I can't help but feel that had it been designed better, I probably wouldn't have had this problem.