Title screen ordering

From top to bottom, most NES games' title screens are title, menu (Start, Password, Options), and a copyright notice if one didn't appear on the previous screen. How jarring would it appear to have the menu appear above the title?

My boss proposed a title screen. I reordered it to the conventional layout, and he said the result was "a little out of balance. [...] the overall look is more important than where players expect to see things." I told him I had to respectfully disagree with the idea that look is more important than usability. I'm looking for pros and cons and whether it really affects balance that much at all.

To me the 1st looks weird while the 2nd look perfectly normal.

First screenshot is completely non-intuitive. Not to be rude, but it's gotta be the second one. See Monster Party for an example.

Second definitely wins.

Top looks awful.

The first one makes absolutely no sense. The interactive part (which is the most important part!) suffers from unintuitive placement and lack of focus (dark text over dark background). Bottom one definitely wins.

Ditch the top one.

We're going with the menu below the title.

Disclosure: My boss OK'd both this straw poll and the other before I posted them.

At the risk of being a devil's advocate, I don't quite understand the argument that this affects usability: you don't need to accelerate someone's first-time progress through a title screen. It feels like the only consequence here is that they might spend a few more seconds looking at it, once, and I'm not sure why that's a problem.

(Not saying that an unusual design won't be detrimental to usability elsewhere, but this is something that requires context sensitive judement. Specific to this title screen I don't think it's problematic at all.)


Aesthetically, I kind of like the thought of having the START / OPTION on top. Kind of unusual. I don't like the "large pixel" pumpkins, or that big ugly "2" eating space at the bottom-- the composition seems unbalanced to me, and I'd want to shift everything down. It didn't really sound like OP's question was about aesthetics though, and I'm not a fan of "design by poll", but my opinion seems slightly contrasting here so I thought I'd risk the comment.

Actually, regarding balance: was the START / OPTION added to the first image as an afterthought? The composition makes more sense to me without that text there at all.

On the subject of unusual title screens, though, Brütal Legend has one of my all time faves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzPaw6Bu9vY

You could also try lowering the whole thing down so that it is more like 2/3 black, 1/3 green BG. That would also leave room for a more centered start/continue. A little unconventional still to have the options above the title, but not a biggie in itself. Or you could cut the green in some fashion from below.

I will go with the first look. It looks good and creative. The second one does not have good attentions to details.

"Haunted Halloween 86 2"? Why in the world isn't it just Haunted Halloween '87? Doesn't it deserve its own subtitle as well?

FWIW, I like the second title screen. Why are the pumpkins double-sized? Are you scaling them up when writing to CHR RAM to save a little PRG space?

In case you're not joking: I believe the "2" is the company logo.

Thefox is right: That's an R for Retrotainment Games. We ended up cutting the R from the title screen and putting this immediately prior.



I don't really know why the artist chose to draw them that way. But World 4 of Super Mario Bros. 3 has a similar chunky aesthetic.

Ah, I misunderstood. I wasn't joking - I thought this was a sequel to the previous game, which I mistakenly thought was '86. I see now that the first is '85, and this sequel does in fact increment the year.

The logo is a little tough to identify, so I guess that's more going for the second version of the title screen.

Giant Land is also intentionally evoking "these things are like normal things, twice as big".

I guess my attempt at "design by poll" was related to how I interpreted psc's comment on that ill-fated first HH85 topic:

We can take this as a good learning lesson that in the future we should share our work with the community before committing it to plastic. Someone could have posted the tunes on chipmusic.org for example to get critiques. An animated GIF of some action could have been shared on pixel art forums or Deviant Art. This project seems to have been kept basically a secret until release. I see this as a good learning lesson. Get some feedback, do some preliminary market (game testing) research first.