What are some of your favourite examples of massive HUDs that take up a large portion of the screen throughout the game?
Does that giant ninja staring at the player stay motionless in that corner for the entire game? If so that supremely rocks
Atic Atac is amazing, and it also features the grilled chicken health meter, sometimes called the chicken-o-meter!
This one always impressed me, Famimaga Disc Vol. 3 “All 1”:
A significant portion of the screen on this FDS game is used to show a first person perspective of the puzzle game field
If only the ninja winked!
I like the Cosmic Soldier games, where the 3D view is a tiny window squeezed in between all the UI elements, including a large static image of a character.
This is one of the things I love about the PC-98. It’s full of big, beautiful HUDs.
Elm Knight: A Living Body Armor
Brandish
Popful Mail
@Mnemogenic beat me to some awesome PC98 ones but my second go-to for enormous UIs is the default EverQuest one!
Also to recover mana originally you had to open your spell book and stare at it which took up the entire viewport
It’s obviously a common way to hide resolution constraints for old PC games, especially early 3D exploration games in first person such as Star Cruiser, Captain Blood or Corporation.
And, of course, Ultima Underworld.
Probably inspired by this era, and maybe the doomguy’s face in Doom, Crime Crackers loves showing its three protagonists at all time instead of the modest aesthetics of its contemporary King’s Field.
No such technical constraint with modern 3D games, obviously, but Tekki / Steel Battalion (2023) cleverly used this trope from mecha-inspired games to better communicate the social status and economic progress of the player as they purchase new mechs.
Not sure if Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS and Wii are automatically disqualified for obvious reasons? But recents ports have led to some interesting interfaces on modern consoles.
I found the old game I was specifically thinking about when I wrote this. S.F.3.D Original: Operation Thanksgiving for the PC-8801.
Which would then influence better known games such as Power Dolls.
Which influenced the UI design of consoles games like The Hybrid Front on the Mega Drive.
Some of these early choices stem from hardware limitations, but the helpful information on display certainly influenced later games such as Quo Vadis 2 and its flexible main map display being completely removed from the rest of the HUD.
