The new pause menu has a few expanded features and visual enhancements. The menu items aren’t as tall, but they are wider to fit all the text. Without the excessive height of the selected menu, I feel it keeps everything in tact better without having to look too far for the next item like the previous versions. The non highlighted menu item text is slightly to the left to better fit the longer words. The cursor pushes forward into the menu item before it hand guns itself back out.

Perhaps the grandest feature of them all that will seem like a glitch is the fact that when you return from the pause menu, you start in slow motion and quickly work back up to full speed. Having the game come back into slow motion forced a lot of variables to get changed to remain consistent with the frames rather than how many frames in a second.

FOR THOSE KEEPING SCORE

This means the pause menu starts by sliding in the left buttons independently at a random increase of speed. Any that go beyond what they should will slowly pull back into place. The blue ribbons fall and slide in while the paused indication slowly scrolls. Meanwhile, the white teeth bite down on the screen and show a snow flurry with occasional sparkles while the screen has a Gaussian blur that fades to black. Menu items change when selected to a larger version, the font changes color and alignment while a tattoo pattern scrolls across the back and the button itself pulsates between different colors. Once something is clicked on, the pointer goes in, turns into a hand gun, and shoots the menu item forward while the pointer recoils backward. The selected menu item will blink between a standard and a red highlight to indicate that yes you’ve clicked it. This is done while the other menu items are sliding away at independent speeds and the teeth open as the screen fades in from black to reveal the old style menu which needs its own paragraph on the minute things that it’s doing. After the game resumes there is a few seconds of slow motion that gets faster before the game returns to 60 frames per second.

Well that paragraph is certainly a mouthful for a simple menu that’s full of details.

On an earlier post, I showed off a mock-up, but here is the final mock-up headed into the menu: