I’m a bit of a car nerd so I loved Forza Motorsport 2. It’s probably the most played game on my Xbox and I have fond memories of taking breaks from my university dissertation to do a quick lap round the Nürburgring. I loved that they put in more common everyday cars alongside the supercar monsters of the game, and there’s even a version of my own car in there, which I bought and painted to be the same (and promptly supercharged).

So I’m pretty excited for the new version coming out this year, not only do the cars look amazingly good, the whole user interface design seems to have stepped up too. From a video I watched, the developers wanted to give the game the feel of a luxury car brochure and it definitely feels like it has matured from the previous version. We now have less brash colours – it’s the cars that deserve to stand out, not the interface – and it just feels much more pleasant and relaxing, although the music helps there too. There’s a lot more generous spacing going on, with the type being set more consistently.

I wouldn’t say that Forza 2’s interface was badly designed – I never had any troubles with its usability – but sometimes things felt a little crowded, a little over-designed and there was always a slight boy racer feel to proceedings.

Part of this new maturity is probably due to HDTV becoming more the norm. I don’t know what the statistics are but I don’t believe it’s even possible to buy a standard definition telly above 20″ these days, and it has been that way for a while.

The extra pixel count allows them to have more control and refinement when setting type. The whole art direction is simpler, but because of that it feels a lot more confident, like it has finally come of age. Sure, we were boy racers once but now we’ve grown up a bit and can start enjoying the finer things in life.

(Yes I’m aware of the maturity of painting video game characters on your car.)

On the opposite side of this is Colin McRae Dirt 2. Whilst Forza 3 goes for the serious understated reserve of a luxury marque, Dirt 2 aims squarely at the fun-loving, extreme sports-watching, energy drink-guzzling, MTV youth culture. When in reality most people’s experience of rallying has more to do with sitting on a cold wet hilltop waiting for a car to blast round a corner and cover you in mud, this more glitzy fantasy rallying is much more enticing and I think it looks fantastic.

You can see how much thought has gone into the interface, in that it integrates with this 3d-world menu system. There’s none of Forza 3’s restraint here, it’s all full-on and in your face, with luminous green filled-in chunky serif type popping out into the world and continuing into the game itself tying the whole thing together. It’s not all mish-mashed together either, you can see the typographic and colour consistency at work and there’s probably a huge style guide behind it all.

I think both these games show the increasing attention to detail that goes into current gen game interface design and the increasing role that graphic design has in the games industry.

As a final horror story I’ll end with a screenshot of one of my favourite games – Trackmania Nations. This is a free multiplayer time-trial style game, where up to about 30 people drive round a track at once (with collisions disabled) and the person who gets the fastest time in the allotted timelimit wins. It’s not uncommon to be playing on a server with people from at least 10 different countries at the same time, and it’s fiendishly addictive. The worst thing about it through is the server mods that install their own little user interface crammed around the existing game one. This coupled with some people’s penchant for brightly coloured names means that this can happen:

Whoever thought that this looked good?