In Destroy All Humans!, the primary objective is to take over Earth through means of deception, tactics, and more noticeably, sheer will. Laine Nooney describes menus as being drastically different than menus we get when we are about to order our food at a restaurant. “Rarely do we discuss simply ‘choosing’ from game menus. Rather, we ‘navigate’ them, like captains gliding across digital surfaces.” When I first played Destroy All Humans! as a kid, I was unaware of what was going on during the cutscenes. Had I known then, I would have been able to turn the subtitles on. Menus today typically allow the player to restore, quit, or customize the controller or audio settings, among other configurations. In Destroy All Humans! however, the menu was not as sophisticated as they are today.
Players have the option of either killing as many humans as they want or completing the objective to advance within the game. Destroy All Humans! keeps stats of almost literally every aspect of what you have accomplished or have not accomplished within the game if you go to the menu. So for me, I personally felt that the game menu allows you to define and customize the experience of the game by revealing what your tendencies actions you undertook while you progressed. You define what you want to get out of the game itself, especially if you like the simulation that it provides if a hostile alien were to land on earth.
As you can see in the pictures above, as you progress through the game itself, it keeps track of how many humans and soldiers you have anal probed, disintegrated as well as destruction of cars, tanks, and buildings. It’s a pretty neat feature that complements the narrative of the game and makes me wonder what the total body count is going to be by the time you reach the end of the game. The menu in Destroy All Humans! incorporates both attributes of digital play as well as participating in the activity of digital play.
In the pictures above, you can see an example of how the menu can be considered as participating in the activity of digital play. The on-screen activity of presenting the player with options to select different discourses of action, seems to emphasize the connection between player and machine. The human agency to choose between what the mayor in the pictures above wanted to say to his constituents was a good choice in utilizing the aspects of choice and menu within the gameplay itself. You could either anger the townsfolk and lie to them causing an uproar. Or you could tell them what they wanted to hear like real life politicians. The similarity between what the options were and what American politicians say in real life was not lost on me. Because in all honesty, what politicians actually tell the truth?
While the varying menus in Destroy All Humans! complement the gameplay itself, I believe there was one aspect of the game that prevented the game from reaching its full immersive potential. That feature was the auto-save screen. For the PS2, the memory card had to be plugged into the console itself before you could even save. The auto-save function today occurs in the background without notifying the player and taking them out of the game-world for a few seconds. In Destroy All Humans!, the auto-save feature was triggered anytime you died, completed a side-mission, or completed the objective. This constant interruption between the gameplay and need to seamlessly combine the auto-save function and narrative of the game was jarring. I feel it emphasizes how important it is to design a video game that doesn’t prevent the player from being totally immersed in the game itself.
Works Cited
Laine Nooney, “Menu” from Debugging Game History (2016), pp. 305-312
Samuel Tobin, “Save” from Debugging Game History (2016), pp. 385-391
Source: What’s Your Body Count?