#118

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DB Contents: Games

Definition

"games" are directly above the versions in ROMdb structure. They are the concept the versions were based on, something along the line "An Italian construction worker climbing up a partially constructed building to rescue a girl from a huge gorilla" which we call "Donkey Kong" and had versions, among other systems, for NES, Arcade, Game Boy...

Games about the same story line form what we call sagas.

┌──────┐      ╔══════╗      ┌─────────┐
│ Saga │ ───> ║ Game ║ ───> │ Version │
└──────┘      ╚══════╝      └─────────┘

Games can have multiple versions as we just explained:

╔═══╗      ┌───────────┐
║ G ║ ───> │ Version 1 │
║ a ║      └───────────┘
║ m ║      ┌───────────┐
║ e ║ ───> │ Version 2 │
╚═══╝      └───────────┘

But they can also belong to two or more sagas; I would say that for example the games "LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures" and "LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues" belong to the sagas "LEGO Indiana Jones" but also to the 100 unofficial "LEGO collect-all-the-tokens" saga which includes tenths of games: Harry Potter, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Batman...

┌────────┐      ╔═══╗
│ Saga 1 │ ───> ║ G ║
└────────┘      ║ a ║
┌────────┐      ║ m ║
│ Saga 2 │ ───> ║ e ║
└────────┘      ╚═══╝

Fields stored

  • Title: As the title of this field says, it's the title of the game =D. It should be the most common name among its versions in english with preference of the oldest ones. i.e. The Super Nintendo version for Ghouls'n Ghosts was released under the name Super Ghouls'n Ghosts (a common practice of the system was to include "Super" in front of many titles); we will take "Ghouls'n Ghosts" as the name for the game since it was the title of the first version released for arcades. Articles must be omitted from the beginning of the titles and added at the end after a comma. i.e. Secret of The Monkey Island, The. The reason of this modification is to avoid accumulation of games in the letter T.

  • Synopsis: A short description of the game, ideally in just one paragraph. It should avoid talking about the technical aspects of the game (number of levels, genre, etc...) and focus on introducing the story, engaging the readers to continue discovering the game. As a rule of thumb, the short texts that appear on the back of the boxes or on some printed advertisments should be a valid text.

  • Genre: The genre(s) of the game. In this sense, the number of genres in ROMdb are quite general. As years go by, many specific sub-genres have been defined or accepted by community (i.e. "Danmakus" for high-number-of-enemies-and-bullets-on-screen-creating-funny-patterns" spaceship shooters). I see those genres more like a trend, temporal as every trend, for a base genre and for that reason they are not covered by itself in the website. Anyway, feel free to discuss this topic as any other in the website section of the forum.

  • Saga: As we saw before, games with a common storyline are grouped into sagas. This is an auto-complete field: type some characters of the saga's name and you'll receive a list of available sagas. If the saga you want doesn't exist, you will need to create it in advance.