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[azeo]

If the game starts with a cinematic, the player could miss it if he doesn't pay attention.

This is one of the things I'm most worried about. We've gotten to the point with games and movies, that there's a ton of extra stuff before the menu, be in commercials or licensing pages. Worst, you can never skip it, so I've gotten into the habit of putting a game or movie in and going on the computer for five minutes. Playing on your own terms is good and all, but I miss the time when you could just go from turning the console on to game play in like two minutes, instead of five.
Which also, coincidentally, why I played so much Super Meat Boy.

[s0]

People often default to menus where a little thought and creativity might bring them to a much more interesting mechanic. Seeing this bothers me.

I dunno what kind of menus you're talking about here exactly, but I'm glad most games have settings menus that are easy to navigate and allow me to change the settings to what I need in 30 seconds never to be opened again. I'm also glad most games don't make loading your save file a chore for the sake of supposed "immersion".

[SirNiko]

Better yet, is to design the tutorial level in such a way that on higher difficulties it functions as an ordinary level.

Wario Land 4 did this by moving the time bomb near the start of the tutorial level, so you have to complete the tutorial in under the time limit to survive, for example.

[William Broom]

What if the game has save slots? Should it just jump into the gameplay without letting the player choose what save slot to load? How is it supposed to know otherwise? There are some things that just require a menu.

99% of the time, the player will want to load the save slot that they were using last time they played the game. If they want to load a different save file, they can do it from the pause menu.

This would make it slightly more annoying to switch save files, but that annoyance would be more than offset by the time and effort saved by skipping past the top menu every time you boot up the game. The only time I can think that this would be a problem is if two or more people are playing the game simultaneously, but I don't think that happens very often.

[Conker534]

Logo/Main Menu/Game

Thats how every game should be. I find it annoying when a game goes into the game right away. I want to see a logo (skipable of course) and a nice main menu. The logo is nice because I recognize who made it, and tend to follow them. Main Menus are nice because they tend to have options, and all that good stuff.

[iffi]

The logo is nice because I recognize who made it, and tend to follow them.

I would think that most of the time you would know who made the game before you played it, so a logo isn't really necessary in my opinion (the least one can do is make it skippable).

It may just be because I'm used to it, but as I've stated previously, I usually prefer a well-designed menu over no menu at all.

[JMickle]

interesting menus are always fun, and the blend between main menu and gameplay is an interesting thing to blur; think spelunky's main menu.

[Core Xii]

Another modern trick is to make the menu system part of the gameplay, too. MegaMan Anniversary Collection (somewhat) and Spelunky both to something along the lines of that.

But as a consequence Spelunky needs a separate configuration utility, because the menu already uses the controls which you need to configure beforehand. I don't like that approach at all.

One very important issue with modern games is settings/controls and the start of the gameplay. Some games dive straight into the action or plot while I'm still looking for the right mouse sensitivity or adjusting graphics for a stable frame rate. It's incredibly awkward if the game begins with me under a cinematic attack or (fake) time-critical mission. Like Mass Effect 2. "Get up Shephard, the station's under attack! No, don't change your graphics settings now, you need to hurry! Alert, alert, get to safety! Forget about the mouse sensitivity already! Damnit, Shephard!!" The absolute beginning of the game should be a calm-ish tutorial type of thing where I can set everything correctly.

[SirNiko]

The above problem is easily solved if the game allows you to configure the options the first time you play, and then leaves those in a buried menu you can access manually during subsequent playthroughs.

For many games, there's no need for such a menu. Console games in particular are pre-configured to fit the system specs so the majority of players can just use the defaults with no concern for adjustments. If there are minor tweaks to be made (like choosing between auto-aim and manual aim) you can just as easily convert these into in-game selections linked to the appropriate items or situations.

The best menu and game design, in my opinion, is that which requires no options menu. The developer has constructed the options in a way that naturally fit the game, or require no adjustment at all.

[Breadcultist]

99% of the time, the player will want to load the save slot that they were using last time they played the game. If they want to load a different save file, they can do it from the pause menu.

What if more than one player is playing the game? You can't always tell who loaded up the game. GTA San Andreas's auto-load thing was annoying when I was playing it alternately with my sister. There wasn't even an easy way to tell which slot it loaded from.

Braid starts with a menu! Hubs are menus. Just (hopefully) prettier, often slower. Occasionally containing distractions.

The best menu and game design, in my opinion, is that which requires no options menu. The developer has constructed the options in a way that naturally fit the game, or require no adjustment at all.

So no choice of single/multiplayer mode (just one per game allowed)? No save/load (or autosave only)? No... volume control?

Menus need only be quick and painless.

[s0]

@SirNiko: But even with consoles, people use different screens and audio output devices, so in-game volume and brightness controls are a must not least because volume and brightness differ across games. I don't wanna have to fiddle around with my TV's brightness settings every time I pop a new disc into one of the 4 consoles currently connected to it.

There is no "perfect" game design that suits every player because (OMG!) different people have different preferences. Some may prefer to turn the background music off, some may like a certain control configuration better than the default one (even if you think it's "perfect" for the game), or in the case of PC games, they might simply have a non-standard keyboard layout, etc. etc.

There's absolutely no reason not to grant the player these freedoms and the most efficient way to do that is menus. So far every "alternate" way of handling these things I've seen has mostly served to make the game more tedious.

[s0]

@Breadcultist, regarding hub worlds: I don't think hubs are necessarily just menu substitutes. There are some that might as well be regular menus (like the aforementioned Braid and Kirby's Dreamland 3 for example), but Super Mario 64's hub world contains its own challenges and secrets which would have been impossible to do with a standard list- or grid-style menu.