Nintendo's Virtual Console needs a designer

Take a look at these screen captures of Nintendo's "Virtual Console" for the Revolution, their next-generation console:

Virtual Console is an online store for games from old Nintendo consoles. The plan, as I understand it, is for Revolution owners to be able to rent or buy classic Nintendo games to play on Revolution. Basically, it's the Nintendo equivalent to Xbox Live.

Xbox Live has over two million subscribers, so you'd think Virtual Console would have to be really good. But these screens aren't good. They're like bad CD-ROM design from 1993 (I can practically hear the CD drive humming away in my Packard Bell 486). And the badness extends past the visuals deep into the menu structure:

• The "Choose a Console" screen is baffling. Nintendo is trying to appeal to new gamers with Revolution, but this menu is strictly for hardcore Nintendo fans. It requires knowing which games appeared on which console--esoteric stuff even for serious gamers.
• The consoles aren't on the market anymore. So what's significance are the little "NES" flags on the game titles? Indeed, why do the console names need to be part of the UI?
• Three menu items per screen? With over 30 NES and SNES games (and probably more coming), that's a lot of scrolling. Tivo has around eight menu items per screen in its Now Playing list--and even that can be hard to navigate.
• I don't like how the left tabs re-order (My Library jumps ahead of Catalog) and re-label themselves (Home Page becomes Back Home).

The screens were obtained from a Nintendo survey and, as IGN reports, they aren't final and may not even be real:*

"Nintendo is considering a variety of options for the virtual console service for our next console, code-named Revolution, although details have not been announced at this time," Nintendo of America said in a statement today. "In our normal course of business, Nintendo conducts consumer research for many of our products with information and imagery that do not represent actual product specifics."

That doesn't exactly ring true for me. Consumer research in the late stages of product development is a lot like usability testing: you need to use a decent prototype to get useful data. While I hope they were evaluating something other than visual design and information architecture, I'm not entirely convinced by Nintendo's statement.

Though I would very much like to be. The Revolution looks to be the first big step forward in console gaming since the Playstation/N64 generation (I'm not counting Xbox Live because it hasn't really changed game play and mechanics, though it did bring networked play to the console world). The details released by Nintendo so far have, for the most part, exceeded expectations.

But this Virtual Console design is a real disappointment. I hope they either show us some of the real screens or hire a designer, quick.

* Maybe Nintendo anticipated a leak and deliberately used bad mock-ups or early iterations. A design deke, if you will.