Oooh, ooh, I almost forgot!

And what's the deal with "Lost Planet" for the Xbox 360? You start the game up, and the steps are as follows:

1. "Press A to choose a storage device, or B to continue." (if you press B, you won't ever be allowed to save your game until you reboot the XBox. And you can't load a saved game, unless you reboot the Xbox and press A.)
   
2. A popup menu sloooowly animates into the screen, allowing you to choose the one and only option on it, which is already highlighted: "Hard drive". The only thing you can do is press A to select it.
   
3. The popup menu sloooowly animates back off screen, and a prompt says "Storage device selected! Press A to continue"
   
4. "Loading.... Please do not turn your console off!"
   
5. "Load successful! Press A to continue!"
   

Now you're looking at the main menu of the game. To continue where you left off last time, you press A, down, A, A, A, and then "Wait... Loading...", and shazaam, you're playing a game.

Now, I'm not saying there aren't legitimate reasons to allow someone to choose between different storage devices. But come ON! Games these days, especially ones from a big studio like Capcom, go through MONTHS of beta testing. And this is a masterfully produced game, polished in almost every way. Every annoyance in the game feels like it was placed intentionally to challenge you, and every time your character dies, you have an opportunity to try a different strategy the next time (there's rarely only one way to do things).

So with all this polish, and all those eyes on it, how did NOBODY say "um... guys, gameplay is great, but our menus are positively abusive?"

*sigh*. Oh, but on another note- man, the Xbox 360 is one polished piece of equipment. Everything in it is exceptionally designed, from the controller to the menu system to (ESPECIALLY) the online component. It's almost like it was designed by Apple!