MobyGames Database Hits 10,000 Entries

flipkin writes "MobyGames, an IMDb-inspired database of video games, has now surpassed the significant milestone of 10,000 game entries. The stated goal of the site has been to meticulously document and catalog every single game ever made, and while they still have a long way to go, 10k is an impressive start." Apart from this site and the excellent Gamefaqs, what other online game databases do you find handy?

Comments

Abandonware

[forged]

I find the Underdogs website to be a fine place to look for old computer games, a/k/a abandonware. As I am writing this they are listing 4439 games online. One of my all-time favorite must be Tera (1986), a relatively unknown and wildely unsuccessful RPG produced 17 years ago when PC's were original 8086's and had CGA monitors. I still play it occasionnally and even began a fansite dedicated to this fine(?) piece of sofwtare.

To get back on-topic I also consult Megagames regularly for all my patches needs and related add-on software.

Don't want to rain on their parade,

[KieranElby]

but the World of Spectrum has 10,677 titles just for one computer - the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

Other gaming sites I have not yet seen mentioned

[veganjay]

Here are my most frequented gaming sites:

For game reviews, gamefaqs. The FAQs are great, but it is also a great place for reading user reviews. If I need more reviews, I head to Amazon.

For screenshots/video, I refer to the "biggies": gamespot and ign.

For Game Boy Advance, I go to: gbacentral.

For Dance Dance Revolution: DDRFreak

However, my favorite site at the moment is for the ol' Atari 2600: Atari Age

AtariAge is amazing: screenshots of almost every Atari 2600 game, very active forums, store that sells cartridges for new "homebrews", etc.

--
jason

purposes and efforts

[s3if3R]

THe existence of efforts like mobygames and IMDB never stop surprising me. Looking at the purpose of such efforts, one finds either

A) Marketing of new games, that reach an established gamer community thru linking the developers earlier efforts,

B) Archiving of an existing culture for posterity.

One can of course see A as a viable and possible truth, even though it doesn't seem to plausible without an accompaning conspiracy theory. B, though, isn't quite enough as an explanation for all the effort people put in collecting information on title, both for IMDB and mobygames, and others, of course.
The answer rather lies in

C) is the best game ever made, and everyone must know about it

And that's the interesting part. This part of us that cries out for the need of affirmation "There must be someone else who's seen " or just plain differentiation "Well HERE's a title NOONE's heard of - makes ME different".

So it's an interesting conflict of interests, trying to gather all information from all the sources of game information into one. For the people running those sources, it means cutting off their means of differentiality, becoming one of many others, rather than just one.

Why is IMDB so big? So widely-used? Because it's so damn good. Why is it so good? You tell me. In the meantime, I'm putting my hopes to mobygames.

Why is MobyGames better than the rest

[NetDanzr]

Some people already mentioned other sites with more games (and some with fewer), but with the exception of Word of Spectrum and Home of the Underdogs, those sites lack the best feature of MobyGames - the crosslinking capability. If you want to research a particular game, you not only get user reviews and screenshots, but also the trivia about the game, and most importantly, a direct link to everybody mentioned in the credits and the developer and producer page. Once there, you can alway dig deeper, seeing which games the particular person participated in, and how those games may have influenced the game you are researching. If there ever will be a computer gaming historian, MobyGames will be a better resource for him than sites that may offer twice the number of games, but little or nothing in addition to the game name.

That said, I have to admit that even MobyGames is far from perfect. All content is user-submitted, and there are numerous mistakes, especially when it comes to release dates and publishers.