One way you could create a screen without scripting,is to set a story zone on top of the player marker and create an .avi of the image you want to show.
In Blender, you would just put the image on a plane, set the camera in front and render to .avi as many frames as you want the screen to show. When you start the game that screen would show for the length of the avi, and then you could have the player start in the weapon select room.Put out the guns on tables or somthing,but you would need to write a script that would allow the player to only take one weapon. Have you seen the random weapon chest? Perhaps you could use that and modify it so that you could cycle through the weapons before selecting one? Just some ideas to get you started,weapon selection and character selection pretty much require scripts,which are not easy for a newbie/intermediate.There's lots of help on the forums though.