It's fine as a landscape layout but not for portrait?Overall I think the new UI is an improvement, particularly because you get a better overview and it's easier to select tables than scrolling through a long list one item at a time. With regards to the visuals I don't think they look good (what is that weird pinball indy car?) but I've kind of learned to take an "it is what it is" approach when it comes to FarSight and graphic design. However I do have a number of issues with the functionality which I'd rather see adressed, I'll repost my opinions from Steam:
- The UI is very scattered now and inconsistent. Having buttons and functions both in a top menu bar, a bottom menu bar, to the left, to the right, in a middle section etc. becomes very confusing and you have to look for what options are available on every new type of screen.
- I also use a controller and because of the button placement it's very unclear where you will land if you try to navigate or use the menus (unless you use the controller to move the mouse cursor but that's kind of cheap) and because the menu seems to remember the selection position of some menu "levels" in the table selection/main screen, the selection jumps around a lot making it even more confusing.
- The game also seems to have major issues correctly registering D-pad presses from my 360 controller because often it will either not register, or double-register, making it difficult to navigate selections and menus. Sometimes it also auto-skips the little table info splash screen and goes directly to the game, because it registered one press of the A button as two?
- Still think it has a bit too many levels and button presses to get where you want. First there's a couple splash screens you have to get by. Then there's some kind of main menu with only a couple of options, of which none interest me, but that still takes up the whole screen.
I think the table grid should be the main game screen, not the above, or the two should be consolidated. At the very least the full table grid should be one of the big buttons on this screen, not hidden away in a tiny little button up in the corner (especially not right next to the "Quit" button!)
Those table info boxes that you have to press through from the grid also feel like they could be shown immediately to the right like in FX2 and not be a separate menu level.
- Different sorting in the grid is nice but is not that useful when there are so many tables and they're all thrown into a pile. The default A-Z grid could be left as it is, but for the others the tables should be grouped under different sections (without having to click through to another level if that needs to be said!) So you can immediately see which tables belong to which season, which are the Williams and Bally tables, the year sorting should be grouped into decades and the rating into the amount of stars. An invert sort might also be a good idea.
If the section titles (descriptions) were to the left you would at least not have to waste so much vertical space. Though I still think the table icons could stand to be a bit smaller than they are now which would also allow the table info to be shown on the same screen. And doing away with the top/bottom bars would increase the vertical space available, those icons could be moved to the same level as the sort options, or they could be removed entirely from the table selection screen (except for a back button) and moved to the main screen, if you're going to have them as separate screens anyway.
I did a very quick mockup of what I was talking about:
That's an invert sort icon in the top left. Perhaps it's too much to have all the table info displayed immediately after all, in which case that part could just stay as it is.
I also find the button layout in the table "attract mode" annoying/confusing in the way the they're spread out in the four corners on two different menu selection rows/bars. There's no reason they couldn't be more centered and on the same row, and with a controller/keyboard you could use the flipper keys to change between custom balls instead of using the direction keys, which might even be more logical now that I think about it.
