Your favourite videogame Front-Ends

[Papercut]

Mr Driller - Drill Land: The slickest front end by far. Fantastic design too.

Wip3out: superb minimalism.

Yoshi's Island: not so much the cgi-ish intro, but the spinning island. Still love that.

Jet Set Radio: so good it took me ages to stop gawking and actually play it.

Space Channel 5 Part 2: pure style. and Ulala

Cubivore: watch a cube with a face muck around, then crap on the floor.

[Fusion]

Metroid Prime
anyone who's seen it knows why.

[dc-arena]

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: THE WIND WAKER
Truely beautiful front end. The camera moving through the little island is so nice, and the music gives me "those shivers" everytime I hear it. Pure soul.

METROID PRIME
The style is amazing, and it just oozes sexyness. Great audio too.

HALO
Someone else has mentioned it previously, but the music is just amazing. Up there with the greats. Lovely usable front end too. Very nice.

SUPER MARIO KART
I'll never tire of seeing the little karts zipping across the screen, with PRESS B penciled on the background in red crayon. Awesome.

REZ
Its disco. Simple as that.

RIDGE RACER
Cool front end, with equally cool music.

MR DRILLER DRILL LAND
So incredibly clean and slick, with some amazing music which always reminds me of Fantavisions music too.

[Che Musashi]

I liked Gran Turismo 2's Cardigans intro. Much better than Lenny Crapitz. I guess that was the Arcade disc.

Mr. Driller Drill Land No argument here, Namco's beatifully scored and animated intro sets the tone for this classic.

Metroid Prime - I swear its the most David Fincher intro ever!

VF4 - for the same reason Faded said. Evo is edgier I guess and but the water effect with that robotic sounding asian girl's voice was killer.

Dynasty Warriors 4 Koei keeps improving the intro's and the menus on this series. 3 may be my favorite game of the series the but the DW4 intro and menu is tight!

[SharkAttack]

Metroid Prime, Mr Driller (I don't own but saw the design on vids and it rocks) and Wind Waker.

For comedy mention i'd say Animal Leader where the cube animal runs on the screen and poops.

[dataDave]

Metroid Prime - Everyone's favourite it seems, including mine.

Perfect Dark" - The true front end doesn't exist until you complete the game on agent, once that's been done you are treated to the PD logo scrolling ever so slowly in the background with trippy style blue, red and purple visuals streaming out towards you. Accompanied by the greatest title screen music of all time. No messy 'Press Start' in sight either.

The menu graphics are unrivalled by anything seen nowadays, this game is still 10 years ahead of it's time.

Should have been postponed for just over a year in order to make it a launch game for the Cube IMO. It still deserves a GC remake.

Ocarina of Time - Classic, the steaming logo was just what I wanted to see after a 6 year long haitus. I completely cut myself off from the net when this game was near completion - the only pre-release screenshot I ever looked at was one from around 14 months before the release. I had built up my own internal hype for this game - and that, was the best thing ever.

[Mr Ono]

C64: Hacker

[Papercut]

C64: Hacker

oooh... on a C64/Atari 8 bit tip:

Bounty Bob Strikes Back - high score table

Little Computer People

Alternate Reality (the whole intro sequence with that crazy song after you've been beamed aboard)

Mercenary (descending towards the planet)

Armalyte

Gribbly's Day Out

[2097]

Metroid Prime - Lovely. The perfect introduction.. Short, gets you right in there, looks amazing, sounds amazing, suits the game and gets you into the right mood with its atmosphere.

Colin McRae Rally 2.0/3/04 - 2.0 tried something very different but has dated slightly.. 3 was more stylish and the squares thing is v.nice... 04 is like a combo of the two but not quite as swish as 3 :O

ICO - There hasn't been anywhere near enough ICO worshiping recently!

Waverace: Blue Storm - Wonderful light airy style, fits the game perfect.

Zone Of The Enders - love the music and the over the top sophisticated sci-fi style.

[Peet]

Ridge Racer 5 - Highly charged, bass thumping, the presentation of Ridge 5 is still something I love to experience to this day. The beautiful Reiko Nagashi oozed class, and the moving silhouette was something I wanted on my PC desktop for ages.

Reiko Nagase was in RR Type 4. In RR5 her name was Ai something.


On a more relevant note, some of my favourite front ends:

Super Mario World
A superb demonstration of Mario's different moves and the essence of the game, and remains original to this day.

Kikikaikai/Pocky & Rocky (SNES)
Any title screen with character art deserves praise, and I just love the little intro.

Metroid Prime
Superb! Super and Fusion are nice too.

Rez
Minimalistic goodness.

Rogue Leader
I want more DVD-esque game front ends like this. My only gripe is that the videos aren't full screen.

Phantasy Star Online (ver.2 for DC and the GC version at least - haven't seen the original)
Just plain nice

[iloveannie]

1. Ocarina of Time undoubtedly.
2. Metroid - very unnerving.

Plenty of others but none the same as above. Perhaps the opening music to GT. Feckin' awesome!

Oh and GTA3 did not look the same as the intro. If only [/b]

[v3rtigo]

Perfect Dark" - The true front end doesn't exist until you complete the game on agent, once that's been done you are treated to the PD logo scrolling ever so slowly in the background with trippy style blue, red and purple visuals streaming out towards you. Accompanied by the greatest title screen music of all time. No messy 'Press Start' in sight either.

Perfect Dark - absolutely! The menu system was fantastic - all accessed through a computer console at the carrington institute wasn't it?
Makes me wonder what went so wrong with the Timesplitters 2 menus... and weapon selection infact - wasn't the way you quick-selected the weapons great? I haven't seem that on a console shooter since I think.

[Max M]

Sonic Adventure's intro movie was lovely. Really made you feel like it was the start of something exciting...

[marcus]

Reiko Nagase was in RR Type 4. In RR5 her name was Ai something.

Thanks for spotting my deliberate mistake

One more from me and still one of the finest introductions to a game Ive seen, has to be Vagrant Story. The game has a certain style which made it so appealing, Ive watched this intro many times, but admit not to proceeding to play the game beyond that. The coolness of the main character as he calmly walks through the hall, the brilliant dragon sequence, but most of all, the fusion of the music and sound effects with the games introductory sequence. Superb.

[ukplumber]

I'll add one more to the Mr Driller Drill Land pile. Great music, oh so cool.

But i was very impressed with the Mario Golf intro. Very slick indeed and it's perfectly timed so you can just about finish a KFC fillet burger(with cheese).