I rather liked the ring menu system; one could go through the various menus quite quickly, (and with pleasant, contextually matched sound effects!) It's similar to the speed one can reach using keyboard shortcuts, but it could never be popular with pc or mobile since mouse / touch cant adopt it well, and those are the methods of input most catered to.

I like to imagine a world where Secret of Evermore did well, financially. It doesn't help that it followed in the footsteps of Chrono Trigger earlier in the year, Final Fantasy 6 the year before that, and then one more year for its spiritual predecessor, Secret of Mana. The bar was so high! Part of its lack of success, though, was a pretty broken combat system (unbalanced), and a poorly implemented "search here" command, which rendered the player needing to swing their weapon spastically when trying to find hidden items. A cool feature with poor UX really hurt that game.

Still, SoE had some really great art, and a decent story. What a great first entry into his professional career for Jeremy Soule (composer), as a teenager just out of high school. Who needs college when there's opportunities available like that? ;)

> "It's similar to the speed one can reach using keyboard shortcuts, but it could never be popular with pc or mobile since mouse / touch cant adopt it well, and those are the methods of input most catered to."

Design decisions for software should take the interface into consideration. That said, I do think ring menu systems can work on PC and mobile. Some mobile apps have a context menu triggered by a long press, I could see a ring-type menu working there. As for PC, I'm not aware of that many examples, but the pop up palette in Krita is one example that could be easily adapted to be closer to a SoM/SoE-style ring menu.

http://youtu.be/jAJmPwe6IoU

Lots of menus on PC can be navigated with the arrow keys, and the highlighted items wraps around when you hit the top of bottom.

> (same developers, different series)

It doesn't affect your point, but Secret of Evermore was actually very unusual in that was developed by an American team.

Thanks for the tip, that is unusual, I can think of one or two JRPG-style games made in the West, but no others for the SNES (though thinking about it, were there any Western developers involved in Earthbound or was that fully made in Japan?).

With the other point I raised, couldn't find something from the Minesweeper dev but did find something from the Solitaire dev. When asked about whether these games were included by Microsoft to help learn how to use Windows he said...

"A post hoc fallacy, I think."

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3zfadv/til_t...