Adventure Gamers - Forums

These games & platforms should be associated in the games database:

iPhone/iPod & iPad
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge - Special Edition
Syberia
The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition

Android
Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror - Remastered
Yesterday

There are some potential site issues I spotted too:

If you use the main search or “Games A-Z” to find a title (e.g. Kentucky Route Zero: Act I but there are many other examples), the search results show tags for the correct platforms (in this case PC, Mac, Linux), but upon opening the “Game Info” page the platform only shows “PC”. Also many titles draw a blank here. Why not pull platform info from the same database fields as the search results page? There are some seemingly less common examples where “Game Info” is more comprehensive too (e.g. Syberia & Yesterday). These views really should be consistent and I’d be happy to help get them that way if a permanent solution is devised.

If you go to “Top Reviewed” and then filter to PS3, you get L.A. Noire as a 5 star game. But if you change the filter to PC, it’s nowhere to be seen. Is “Top Reviewed” a static list? It seems like it should be dynamic, since there’s already the static “TOP GAMES” lists. Is there a third data store for platform in the review itself?    

If you go to “Games A-Z”, there’s no platform filter for Linux (might be a good opportunity to add PS4 and Xbox One too).

Well that’s it for now, hope this can help make Adventure Gamers better!

Thanks, xlynx.

I’ve updated all the missing platforms you highlighted. I do appreciate when people give us the heads-up, as it’s hard to keep on top of all the updates and ports.

Your other points are noted as well. The games database and filters are ever works-in-progress with known weaknesses. Slowly but surely, we’ll get to ‘em all!

I’m not sure what you mean by this line:

There are some seemingly less common examples where “Game Info” is more comprehensive too (e.g. Syberia & Yesterday).

More comprehensive than what, and in what way?

Jackal - 27 July 2013 12:45 PM

More comprehensive than what, and in what way?

I just meant neither data point could be made authoritative without losing data. To make it consistent, you’d either have to go through every game manually, or just bite the bullet and drop some data for the sake of future consistency.

Thanks for associating those games/platforms

Marek - 27 July 2013 05:14 PM

It does make sense to have it set up this way though. The game entry can be associated with every platform whereas a review can be just for a specific version of the game.

So there’s going to be slight inconsistency sometimes, usually due to games getting released on additional platforms after their initial release.

Thanks for your reply I’m a bit confused though; my first point wasn’t referring to reviews at all. Let’s take an example for clarification. These are what I’m calling entries in the games database. In this case, we have one for DS and one for everything else:

Syberia (DS)
Game Info displays: DS
Search displays: DS

Syberia (all other platforms)
Game Info displays: iPad, iPhone/iPod Touch, PC, Xbox
Search displays: PC iPhone iPad

Both the ‘Game Info’ and search result data can list platforms, even for games that do not have any associated articles/reviews, such as Aaron Crane: Paintings Come Alive.

Therefore it seems Game Info could show a comma separated concatenation of the same platforms displayed by search without interfering with the ability to have platform specific reviews. Or is that what you meant by “Unfortunately the way we’re set up we can’t quite jump around between these tables as easily as we’d like.”—That you agree, but it’s difficult under the current architecture?

The only discrepancy in your example is that the search filter doesn’t include Xbox for Syberia. And that’s because it’s the actual Xbox and not Xbox 360. The system is designed to recognize those as separate platforms, and to keep our search filters reasonably concise, we limited them to the current generation consoles. Probably not too many people out there asking themselves how many first-gen Xbox games exist.

Now, an argument could be made that a single “Xbox” filter should yield ALL Xbox-family games (and PlayStation, Wii, etc.), but that’s why it works the way it does at present.

The DS example is unrelated to anything. DS games are deliberately given separate entries because they are inherently much different games than any other platform. For all intents and purposes the PC/Xbox/iPad versions of Syberia are the same game. DS version: much different animal.

I wasn’t trying to say anything about DS, Xbox or Syberia. The example was entirely to demonstrate site structure.

Other than correctly pointing out that reviews have their own platform designations unrelated to the game info pages, anything you were trying to demonstrate with your two Syberia examples is lost on me.