PS3

I was watching my brother re... program? Reset? You know, actually, I'm not sure what he was doing, but he was fiddling with the settings of his Playstation3! He sent it in to get repaired since it started having some problems and the warranty still covered it. So I was watching him play around with the menus and I thought "wow, this is pretty cool! The graphics are really smooth!" (Smooth, just like the gorgeousness of SquareEnix's Final Fantasy games. Swoon! Sorry, Capcom, you lose.)

Everything has this flowy feel to it; including the background. It reminds me of water or air... it has a thin, transparent quality to it, and it fluctuates slowly across the screen. The icons don't have text to show you what the icon is until you scroll over it, and whichever setting you are on, the text will light up. A simple and effective touch. On another screen, an alphabet keypad pops up. (I'm assuming it's screen where you enter your username and such.) They keypad was a very easy to read. You can't really "type" on game consoles, so it's important that your letters on the screen are easy to read when you scroll over them, so that you know which letter you're selecting.

The only thing I thought was weird about the menu setup was that the game button was the last one on the screen (the icons line up horizontally, so the game one was the one on the very right). For a gaming console, you would think that it would be one of the first few icons for you to scroll through. I'm not sure what rationale the designers used to get this approved, but I bet it was spectacular since the folks at Sony were convinced it was a good idea to put that icon there.