Hi! I'm a newbie to the forum, but have been listening to the playlist for YEARS now. I'm hoping to contribute back to the community in my own way. I've been researching some of the games from the playlist, and noticed a handful of mistakes. I was wondering if there was an official place to report these? Thanks!
Thank you Cats! I've done a quick first pass over the playlist, and compiled a list of changes that I feel could be made across 130 titles. But first I wanted to show you what I'm working on: Spoiler (Move your mouse to the spoiler area to reveal the content) Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler This is my own take on an audio player for the playlist. It visualizes the music with the purple wave along the bottom, and displays respective game covers and info. What I'm doing is using your playlist to scrape the IGDB API. If you're unfamiliar with IGDB, they were bought by Twitch and power their game covers for their network. I'm pulling game covers from IGDB based on the game titles from the list, and linking to the relevant game info. This is still a work in progress, but I am making steady advancement. My hope is that, as people listen to the music, the artwork inspires them to seek the games out of curiosity. What I'm hoping from you would be a few things. First, I was hoping we could add more metadata fields to the playlist JSON including: Duration Release date Platforms Possibly the IGDB ID directly? These would massively help refine searching 3rd party services to pull additional data. Right now I'm doing my best to clean searches up, but it's error prone - it searches out closest match. For example: ActRaiser returns the stupid legacy mobile port - if I had the release date I could better filter it out. If I had the IGDB ID it would make searching unnecessary, and I could direct link the resources. I'd be more than willing to do this for you, but if this isn't possible, at least just cleaning up the game titles would probably be enough. What are your thoughts?
That actually looks pretty amazing, my dude. Strangely enough, I've never heard of IGDB, maybe in passing; I've always been used to MobyGames. I'd love to use it in VIPVGM, but VIPVGM doesn't have any back-end code. I made it so people could save the HTML page and/or embed it just like the ol' vip.swf. Weird, huh? For that reason, it's useless to me if I add the IGDB IDs to the JSON. I am willing to add the release date (but only the year) to display on the playlist. Possibly also the platform. Possibly. The duration? Eh, might be a bit much.
Year and platform would be super helpful. Especially with all the remakes / remasters nowadays, I think this could be a great change overall to the list. The issue is the list currently includes year/platform sometimes in the title, which pollutes the data. It's not the end of the world to parse out, but it would be way easier and accurate if it was just kept as a separate field in the json/xml, and then you could then format it however on the front end. I totally get not wanting the IGDB ID. With year / platform separated it would make the issues I've been having parsing IGDB essentially non-existant. The duration is whatever - nice to have but not entirely necessary. I really appreciate you having an open mind to these changes. I'd be happy to help with the data entry. I have an excel sheet I slapped together for the title changes I came across - some are typo fixes, and some are just opinions. Anyway, I created a google sheets with some of the possible changes I found. You can use none of them, some of them, or all of them - won't offend me any. These game titles were broken when doing a direct name search on IGDB, so that's how I came across them. IGDB might actually have incorrect info on some of them, so take anything there with a grain of salt. Here's the doc
LOL, being open-minded is pretty much my MO. It's why the playlist is the way it is. Aw, dude, you didn't have to do all that work with the document. I would've gotten to fixing the titles... eventually. But thanks anyway. I will probably end up agreeing with almost all of the changes in the doc. You can expect the name changes in the next update, then the year/platform at a later update.
It's no big deal! Honestly, the app I'm working on as a portfolio piece aside, my major motivator was simply learning more about the games out of plain curiosity. There's so many I've never heard of, but have enjoyed their music for years thanks to you. Like DDRKirby for example, their music is incredible but most of their games were Ludum Dare entries that no one ever played. Or Shuttle Scuttle, some random mobile game that no longer exists HAD NO RIGHT TO GO SO HARD. Or Another Bound Neo, a Japanese Freeware FPS that looks pretty awesome. There's a ton of titles that I can point to - it's been fun researching them. However, many of these games are obscure and at risk of being entirely forgotten. Saphire Control is a great example. The only evidence I can find it existed was a YouTube recording of Mercury Sea (taken from your playlist no doubt), with the abandoned website noted as sapphirecontrol.net. The internet archive only has a simple ftp server indexed for that URL, with a few of the songs there, but no evidence of an actual game. Because the URL is defunct, as far as I can tell, as of today your playlist is the only active evidence I can find that this 'game' ever existed. So, I'm just interested in documenting these - the music alone deserves it. As for the titles, I was just trying to match them up with the IGDB listings. Generally they go with the North American releases, unless a different region would be more appropriate (if the game was never launched outside of Japan for example). One issue though is that they prefer capital casing in their titles, and simply document the stylized casing as an alternative, but the problem is they're super inconsistent about it. For example according to their guide lines CLANNAD should be Clannad, and echochrome should be Echochrome. So in many cases I'm unsure what the appropriate title should be. Anyway, if you want help I'm eager to assist. Let me know!
Sad thing about what happened to some of those games. It also boggles my mind sometimes how I even find those things. It's like a rabbit hole going from one soundtrack/artist to another. Like you mentioned Sapphire Control. The game was originally posted in this forum by CobaltBW(aka Blue Warrior). It turns out Blue Warrior was one of the composers of Freedom Planet and they have a SoundCloud here, still making music! Now I'm gonna add everything they've made to my massive backlog. This wouldn't have happened if you hadn't mentioned it, so thanks for the indirect request. I, too, get excited doing research(in general) and finding obscure video game music. I'll keep you in mind if I need assistance.
Hey, I renamed pretty much all of them. I even edited some info on IGDB itself. I also put in new fields for the year and platform for the tracks that need them. I'm gonna be lazy and not do it for every track. I have a couple of issues: Phantom of the Asteroid - Wikipedia and Mobygames have this game listed as this. According to Wikipedia, "the cover art reads Phantom of the Asteroids, but the loading screen says Phantom of the Asteroid, while the title screen says Phantoms of the Asteroid". Very strange. Sonic Generations - Unleashed Project - Also a bit strange is that every other source has it as this, but IGDB just has it as "Unleashed Project". I'm leaving it as is, because it makes more sense. I was wondering if you're able to search IGDB's alternative titles field. The above issues can be fixed by searching that field.
Hey sorry, for the delay! I got busy with life and replaying FF6 Pixel Remaster (nostalgia is great isn't it?). I'm back to working on this again. Phantom of the Asteroid I believe I had already looked into and added it on IGDB myself with the best info I could find. It was a weird one because it's exactly as it says, that it has 3 separate titles for that same game. It's so obscure that I couldn't find much on it. I went with the in game title screen - figured it was the most accurate. (Edit: I think the admins updated it to the box / poster art fyi) Sonic Generations, I'll ask the IGDB admins about it. Maybe it's a copywrite thing? The database is mostly user uploaded, so a ton of stuff slips through / isn't totally accurate. They have a very active discord that they're really good about answering questions. I'm pretty sure I can search alternative titles, which should solve 99% of the issues. Already with the changes you've made - almost everything is working now for the front end.
Sounds good! I actually added a game to the IGDB for F1 Grand Prix Star II for the latest VIP update.
