Collection and played cataloging

[Frenzie]

I’m splitting this off so as to prevent polluting the topic about how many video games you completed.

Some relevant posts with links to potential aids (in the form of websites as well as spreadsheet ideas):

How many video games have YOU completed?

There are also some places like https://glitchwave.com/ and https://backloggery.com/. I haven’t tried them. but at least theoretically they could offer advantages like game library import and easy game adding, provided they offer something like CSV export. Edit: https://www.grouvee.com/ Edit 2: Backloggery does not currently offer export. It says it’s planned. Edit 3: Glitchwave is not taking new members. That leaves Grouvee and less likely HowLongToBeat as potential spreadsheet altern…

How many video games have YOU completed?

As I was looking for some inspiration on which headers to put in my spreadsheet, I came across Completionator. It seems to tick all the right boxes: The interface isn’t a total disaster GOG/Steam import, although GOG import isn’t working out for me atm. Sane Excel export, but I’m not sure why filters aren’t enabled on the headers by default. AutoFilter is just one click away of course. http://www.completionator.com/ It looks like even if you don’t want want to use this website, at the very…

How many video games have YOU completed?

A quick test with some older titles shows that grouvee knows them, while completionator doesn’t (e.g. Shadowlands, Phantasie III). Given that it should be fairly trivial to turn JSON into CSV, I might stick to the former. Thanks for your investigation though!

This morning I continued looking a little bit more into Completionator, which, while still looking good as a starting point for a spreadsheet, has two primary antifeatures I’ve come across so far:

• A potential lack of older games as pointed out by @kaiman, without the apparent ability to add your own custom games.
• A required completion time. I submitted a bug report in which I wrote that I’m required to enter some nonsense value just to mark a game as completed.

Also for me it’d make more sense I played GK2 in the period of 2014-2015 than anything more specific… But the closest you can get to something more generic is something like 2014-01-01, which is rather annoying for all the games you actually played on January 1. In a spreadsheet this’d all be a piece of cake, so I’m hardly sold yet. To use that website I’d effectively have to create a massive fiction.

[kaiman]

During my search yesterday, I also came across AllMyGames. They had Spider Kong from the Atari 2600, but I did not try any other titles.

Anyway, here’s the spreadsheet I ended up with.

For the release date I took the year of initial release, even if it was not necessarily for the platform. Acquired is a bit of guesswork, obviously (and it’s not Purchased, because I did not buy some of those games in the past; or only much later). I have pretty strong evidence I got my Amiga for Christmas '88, and I did not get any games for at least a couple months (just playing around with Workbench and BASIC was exciting enough, no need for games, right? ). For the most part, I assumed I got the game soon after release.

I’m also thinking about splitting the PC system into PC (DOS), PC (Windows) and PC (Linux). For now I only have Amiga, PC and NDS in the System column.

[Frenzie]

@kaiman

Acquired is a bit of guesswork, obviously (and it’s not Purchased, because I did not buy some of those games in the past; or only much later).

I played quite a few games borrowed from the library and/or a friend. Some I acquired by trade. For example, that’s how I ended up with GTA. I don’t recall what I traded it for.

@kaiman

PC (Windows) and PC (Linux)

Is there a meaningful distinction? I (re)play games on Linux but all of those run on Windows as well. But these are our own tracking systems so whatever makes sense to you of course!

Then there are games from roughly 2010 or earlier that tend to run better on Wine than on Windows, but that’s something else still. For optimum compatibility I should probably just run 'em in a VM, regardless the host platform.

[kaiman]

@Frenzie

Is there a meaningful distinction?

From a purely practical perspective, no. I assume I could play 99% of the games on Linux just fine. The distinction is purely for statistical reasons, and valuable only to me (as those stats won’t be very meaningful, given the small sample size and a bias towards native Linux games).

[Frenzie]

There might be some minor interest in noting that I played many of the best games of this decade, like Primordia, Oxenfree, Thimbleweed Park, and Mark of the Ninja on Linux.

Also potentially worth noting are the games I didn’t play on Linux due to performance reasons (at the time), like Dreamfall: Chapters and Shadow Tactics. Also my controller wasn’t fully supported until more recently (thanks to Valve).

Something I could also track if I wanted to is language and input method. I completed Tomb Raider (2013) twice in English on Windows, once with mouse and keyboard, a few years later with an Xbox One controller, and a few years later once more in French on Linux. If I ever play Unforeseen Incidents again, naturally I’ll do it in German.

To properly make use of that I’d also have to track which languages are supported by a game, so that I can do something like filter a list of games that I last played through at least four years ago, that I haven’t played in French yet, that have a French localization available. But then it quickly becomes an administrative nightmare, or at least more in the realm of what I’d like to be paid for doing, which is where crowd-sourcing such knowledge on a website like Completionator comes into play.

PS That’s not some convoluted invention on my part. It’s pretty much the only scenario in which I’d consider replaying a game like Monkey Island right now.

One way to do something like that relatively easily would be to use Power BI instead of a spreadsheet (i.e., just grab supported language data from GOG/Steam/MobyGames/whatever), but then suddenly we’re stuck with a proprietary solution.

PPS AllMyGames imported my GOG & Steam libraries like a champ, but it’s extremely significantly simpler than Completionator. However, this could potentially be a good thing because it makes it simpler to actually quickly track something. But it can only export your “personal data”, which basically just means my e-mail address… so as nice as it potentially looks, that’s kind of a deal-breaker for me. Also I don’t like its ridiculously designed endless scrolling antics. The FAQ and stuff are at the bottom of the page, bu they’re unreachable! Unless, of course, you’re “lucky” and it fails at endless scrolling.

You might think I’m too critical or something, but LibraryThing does close enough to everything I want. It’s not a case of only something I personally designed could serve my needs. I’d settle for the pre-Amazon Goodreads of videogames. I only left because the post-Amazon changes drove me away.

[Sushi]

@Frenzie

that I haven’t played in French yet, that have a French localization available

Or a Dutch one (possibly fan-made)

I wonder what’s in it for all the different providers of these lists? I read the fine print, but it isn’t clear how they earn some money based on this (which they obviously must).

For that reason, I refuse to import my whishlists in things like fanatical.

Regarding PC (Win) vs PC (Linux) or other platform variants, I’m more interested in keeping track of the game version I played rather than the (equivalent) hardware platform.
For example Loom (EGA) and Loom (VGA-CD ROM) are both on PC, both DOS, still so much different they should be two separate entries.

[kaiman]

@Sushi

I wonder what’s in it for all the different providers of these lists? I read the fine print, but it isn’t clear how they earn some money based on this (which they obviously must).

Yeah, I don’t really feel comfortable entering my data (much less importing it from other services), if I can also keep it locally. The only bit I’d actually like to have in addition would be a picture of the box cover (though good luck getting that for most of today’s games). I’m certainly not going to add those to a spreadsheet, though.

[Frenzie]

@Sushi

Or a Dutch one (possibly fan-made)

For that particular game with that particular translation, I figure I would. More generally, probably not. Doing it in French combines the pleasure of experiencing the game in a new way with keeping up and hopefully also improving the language. (That works out better on talkies though.)

@Sushi

I wonder what’s in it for all the different providers of these lists? I read the fine print, but it isn’t clear how they earn some money based on this (which they obviously must).

LibraryThing, the gold standard (afaik), only gives you a 100 (now 200) title database for free. Then:

Enter 200 items for free, as many as you like for $10 (year) or $25 (life).

I think that used to be $20? In any case, I’ve had this lifetime subscription for many years now, so it’s not entirely clear how that’s financially viable in the longer term. I suppose it works as long as the site keeps growing.

@Sushi

For example Loom (EGA) and Loom (VGA-CD ROM) are both on PC, both DOS, still so much different they should be two separate entries.

True. I left it somewhat implicit, but I’ve played Monkey Island EGA, VGA and SE, possibly all of them at least twice. And of course I finished Zak in two different versions as well. Or did I finish it in three?

@kaiman

The only bit I’d actually like to have in addition would be a picture of the box cover (though good luck getting that for most of today’s games). I’m certainly not going to add those to a spreadsheet, though.

Also a thing where Power BI could come in useful. Basic Excel spreadsheet as main data source, extended with stuff like language and covers from an online service. Grmbl.

Don’t get me wrong, Power BI also greatly annoys me. When I last tried it, it couldn’t even use regular expressions to clean up source data (e.g., from Wikipedia) and it didn’t even have properly functional undo. (Then again, Excel barely does either.) But I’m definitely missing some of that Power BI potential in plain Calc/Excel, as cool as pivot tables may be.

[Sushi]

@kaiman

The only bit I’d actually like to have in addition would be a picture of the box cover (though good luck getting that for most of today’s games).

You could also rely on LaunchBox. Then again, unless you are manually making box scans or downloading images yourself, that also allows them to profile you. Except that you do not provide your (albeit encrypted) access to your GOG/Steam/… libraries

[kaiman]

That got me thinking: there must be an App for that, surely? Turns out, there are. Several.

• http://www.gcstar.org/
  This one looks to be the nicest, from a purely visual aspect. I installed it and tried adding a game, only to be greeted by a number of errors in the terminal. Seems to be written in perl, requiring a large number of modules, and there seem to be issues with compatibility if modules are too new or too old. In theory, it would use MobyGames to pull in data.
• http://www.datacrow.net/
  Turns out this one is no longer actively developed. Better stay away.
• http://tellico-project.org/
  I balked at installing that, as it would have required an additional 150MB of QT and KDE packages. Maybe if I’m in a better mood. OTOH, it comes with the most comprehensive documentation of the three, and seems to offer all the information one could want regarding a game collection:
  Video game collections have 16 default fields: Title, Platform, Genre, Release Year, Publisher, Developer, ESRB Rating, Description, Personal Rating, Completed, Purchase Date, Purchase Price, Gift, Loaned, Cover and Comments .

Since they can pull data from various web sources, they might be quite convenient (though hard to tell from just looking at the manual).

Also, came across https://www.igdb.com, which knows both Phantasie III and Shadowlands.

[Frenzie]

An app like that definitely has some very concrete advantages over SAAS where lack of export is a deal breaker. You can still use something that works well for many years after it stops being updated. There’s even some useful Windows 3 software I’ve used in Wine within the last two years. (An XP VM should also work.) When it’s open-source the worst case scenario becomes even better, since you can update it yourself with minor effort for a while, at least until someone starts breaking APIs and you’d have to actually start maintaining it.

GCstar has been included into Debian Sid (unstable) and Debian Squeeze (testing) . So users only need to run (as root):

It seems to have been removed again since and I can’t do that. See here.

And in any case, I already checked and Tellico and GCStar can import each other. So except for the more unique features it looks like you can safely start in either. Griffith (listed as import/export) is also in the repos, but the website seems to be dead so presumably the project is too.

But yeah, same here on the KDE/Qt stuff. After I uninstalled Kdenlive my KDE libs disappeared with it. An excellent program btw, I just have no present need for it.

But my internet is fast and my OS disk space is plenty, so that downloaded installed in what, 10, maybe 15 seconds?

Something like Tellico might be interesting because i don’t actually have a catalog of my movies either, only a partial catalog of my books.

[Frenzie]

Import from Completionator works well enough as Excel export → LO Calc → CSV → import. (In my quick test I didn’t bother assigning every row a field, just the title.)

You can add your own fields.

You can’t as filter things as easily as in Excel or Calc, but you can do it:

It’s not clear to me how to get data from online sources. You can do an Internet search on some integrated platforms but it doesn’t seem to work for TheGamesDB.

It works for IMDb, which is great for adding stuff the first time, but it doesn’t look like you can use it to fill out missing info in already existing entries.

[kaiman]

@Frenzie

It seems to have been removed again since and I can’t do that. See here.

Ah, looks like it’s more or less abandoned too. I misread the dates on the website for 2018, but they are 2016 instead. It’s still present in the Ubuntu repository, but if it hasn’t been kept up-to-date with its dependencies, that would explain the various perl errors I’ve seen. So looks like Tellico is the best option.

Guess I have to get over myself and accept the 150MB of (mostly) useless libs. Given that even simple games measure in the GB range these days, why bother about something so miniscule.

[Frenzie]

Plus then there’s no barrier to installing Kdenlive. As far as I’m concerned it’s the best FOSS video editor. (Some people say OpenShot is good too, but every version I’ve tried was a crash party.)

But kidding aside, some of those KDE apps are excellent.

Here’s what the video thingy looks like:

The cover image is very low-res for me. I wasn’t looking for cover images at all, but it’s kind of like if they’re there I want them to look good… Note that the IMDb original isn’t thumbnail sized and would look perfectly fine.

(Or put another way, the app only looks okay on UHD thanks to Qt and clearly has some ye olde low-res design assumptions.)

Anyway, I was completely unaware of Tellico. Regardless what I end up doing with my games (if anything ), this just might be the thing for my movies. Cheers!

[Frenzie]

@kaiman
Completionator added my missing games within a couple of days. It might be annoying if you have a lot but they definitely seem to be responsive.

https://completionator.com/Forum/PostList/6?page=101

I haven’t really gotten started on adding anything physical yet, but for the moment I’ll at least try to keep a log of sorts on there for 2019.

[Sushi]

This Tellico seems nice (handling more than only games)… but it is for Linux only.
Any chance I can get that running on Windows?

(sorry for the probable noob-question, but I don’t have a Linux installation at home/not really confident on making a dual boot thing)

I could also start in a spreadsheet, but that would probably mean double work when I switch systems

[Frenzie]

As an aside, the Completionator dev will actually be addressing most of my immediate concerns.

@Sushi

Any chance I can get that running on Windows?

Yes actually. The Windows Subsystem for Linux is a surprisingly normal Ubuntu, so you can run sudo apt install tellico just like I did.

Then all you need to do is display it:

How to Run Graphical Linux Desktop Applications from Windows 10's Bash Shell

The adventurous could also try building it on Windows. Qt and most of KDE can run on Windows. And I can tell you I’ve successfully edited several dozen movie fragments on the Kdenlive Windows build, so it’s not just some of the simpler apps & libraries. (Kdenlive had a few minor issues like with play/pause in preview, but it was very much usable.)

But the other option should be a lot simpler & faster.