30 replies to this topic

[eridani]

So yah, i was thinking that the game classification is not optimal as of now, i find myself a bit confused sometimes when looking for things, i don't know if someone else feels the same way.

Crude example:

- Hey i want to play something like Puyo Pop, lets go to TPT to see if we can find something interesting

- Lets see, so is a puzzle, now, where to?

- Hey there are no puzzle category lets go to Action (PP is all about speed)

- Na, nothing here, ok lets go to "Other"

- Yah here, found something...

Or where should i put Shoot 'em Up games like Touhou? Is the people who visit Action category actually looking for Space Invaders? or are they looking for something like Resident Evil?


Should i merge Macross with Tetris inside "Other"?
Where is the place for Mortal Combat 3? Action? Sports? Other?


You see my point?

In my opinion there are some categories which if added can maintain this place more organized, making the life easier helping people to find what they are looking for faster and with less effort. I think the next are the categories that should exist for the game section of the PDB.

Action

Adventure

Board

Educational

Fighting

FPS

Platform

Puzzle

Racing

Rhythm

Role Playing

Shoot 'em up

Simulation

Sport

Strategy

18+

Other

There exist more categories and different ways to categorize games, but imo these are the (less) genres that should exist to sort games in here.

[cluthz]

Adding more categories will just make it harder and more places to look.
Like "Fighting" what is supposed to go there? A boxing game? Skyrim? MW3?

Simpler is better imho and there is a search function

[cybershark]

Nah, I like the idea with more categories. and in my opinion the categories are very clear. So +1 for more categories.

Maybe fighting is not that good -> Beat em up is clearer I think

[HiPhish]

I think the Action category is too general. It contains Beat 'em Up, Shoot 'em Ups, Top-down Shooters, and of ourse Action Adventure- Splitting it up would be a nice idea. maybe have a Shooter category for every shooter tha tis not FPS (since there are so many FPS that they deserve their own category)

[GameGuy]

I'm with cluthz simpler is better. I didn't like the categories on the old forum I usually found myself giving up and just hitting the "Our Latest Ports" button and just scrolled down till I found it. Unless with the new board system a customization feature can be added so you can edit various settings in the my settings tab to bundle ports into categories or just alphabetical. Could be a nice feature.

[eridani]

cluthz, on 30 January 2012 - 09:02 AM, said:

... "Fighting" what is supposed to go there? A boxing game? Skyrim? MW3?

Simpler is better imho and there is a search function

Skyrim is a Role playing game, and all Call of Duty are FPS you know that =P.

I was thinking of Fighting (and wikipedia too) for King of Fighters/Tekken like games, WWE and boxing games included.
Simpler is good ofcourse but we should get the simpler without lacking anything.

At this time if i want something like Puyo Pop Fever (Action Puzzle) how should i look for it in the search box? where it should be placed? inside Action or inside Other?, should it be with Assassins Creed (Action-Adventure) or with Crayon Physics Deluxe (Puzzle)? different from both imo. Today yo can put everything into Other, and it is good now because there are only a few titles, but maybe in the future when the PDB grow up Others will be a total mess.

[cybershark]

I don't like the name fighting Xd it's not clear. I believe something like Beat 'em up is better. And I definitively want a Puzzle section. Oh and eridani make a port for Puyo Pop fever please. it looks fun

In my opinion Action is way to big and many games in there doesn't fit perfect into action.

[eridani]

Of course i'll. I tested it in NDS some ages ago and it was really funny, just last week i found that a PC version exist, i'll try to get it and then... the port. =3

Yah Beat 'em Up is good; the point is that we need a more organized DB for the future, is not necessary to be called Fighting, just have to be a clear name and if Fighting doesn't describe clearly what the category contains then lets use some other word.

[Hrachya]

eridani, on 30 January 2012 - 05:52 PM, said:

Skyrim is a Role playing game, and all Call of Duty are FPS you know that =P.

I was thinking of Fighting (and wikipedia too) for King of Fighters/Tekken like games, WWE and boxing games included.
Simpler is good ofcourse but we should get the simpler without lacking anything.

At this time if i want something like Puyo Pop Fever (Action Puzzle) how should i look for it in the search box? where it should be placed? inside Action or inside Other?, should it be with Assassins Creed (Action-Adventure) or with Crayon Physics Deluxe (Puzzle)? different from both imo. Today yo can put everything into Other, and it is good now because there are only a few titles, but maybe in the future when the PDB grow up Others will be a total mess.

Assassin's Creed is an action game. It goes to action section. Puyo pop fever is NOT an action game, nor it is a puzzle game. It goes to Other. Crayon Physics is a puzzle, and it goes to Other. Fighting? If you mean something like WWE, it goes to sports section. If tekken, it ain't a sport, it goes to Action.

Board - I have no idea what that is.
Educational - I don't know who plays those games, mostly little kids. Their parents won't start learning how to port, for a game. Easier will be to get windows, so no.
Puzzle - Yes that should be there.
Rhythm - Thats not a game category, or I have not heard of it.
Shoot 'em up - Whats? That goes to Action/FPS category.
18+ - All shooter games are 18+. So no, unless you are going to take down Action and FPS categories and put the games from there to 18+ section, which is pointless.

[cybershark]

i was sneaking a bit through the games yesterday and sometimes i really wonder what goes in the adventure section. and other sections as well. Well, it's really difficult to give every game a genre i think.

But whatever. A puzzle section is definitively a good idea.

i think the category board is meant like Board games. I don't believe that there will be much ports in future , so maybe not needed.

oh and I'm the only one who think the search function on this page isn't great? I often can't find a game in the portdb i know that it exist. I write the name and the damn search thingy can't find th egame -.-

[devilhunter]

cybershark, on 12 February 2012 - 10:11 AM, said:

oh and I'm the only one who think the search function on this page isn't great? I often can't find a game in the portdb i know that it exist. I write the name and the damn search thingy can't find th egame -.-

Any example where this happens?
Also the report site problems is for something like that.

[eridani]

Hrachya, on 12 February 2012 - 12:23 AM, said:

... Puyo pop fever is NOT an action game, nor it is a puzzle game. It goes to Other.

It is an action-puzzle game, it is both.

Hrachya, on 12 February 2012 - 12:23 AM, said:

Fighting?... If tekken, it ain't a sport, it goes to Action.

Tekken^link is an arcade-fighting game, aswell as KoF^link is; both are far different from Assassin's Creed^link which you say "goes to action".

Hrachya, on 12 February 2012 - 12:23 AM, said:

Board - I have no idea what that is.

Games like Mario Party, card games, etc.

Hrachya, on 12 February 2012 - 12:23 AM, said:

Educational - I don't know who plays those games, mostly little kids. Their parents won't start learning how to port, for a game. Easier will be to get windows, so no.

You are just guessing...

Hrachya, on 12 February 2012 - 12:23 AM, said:

Rhythm - Thats not a game category, or I have not heard of it.

Music games like Dance dance revolution, Audiosurf, etc.

Hrachya, on 12 February 2012 - 12:23 AM, said:

Shoot 'em up - Whats? That goes to Action/FPS category.

Shot 'em up is different from First Person Shooter which is a very specific category inside action games. Both are shooters and can indeed go inside Action.

Hrachya, on 12 February 2012 - 12:23 AM, said:

18+ - All shooter games are 18+. So no, unless you are going to take down Action and FPS categories and put the games from there to 18+ section, which is pointless.

So Touhou, Ikaruga, Space Invaders, Duck Hunt!!!, etc. are 18+? you kidin rite? but lets don't go that far, many Call of Duty (FPS) are rated Teen ^link by the ESRB, same with those popular agent 007 games and many many others; Teen is a category for 13+ and if you don't know CoD/Golden Eye are shooters too, even some Resident Evil games are rated Teen. So NO, not every shooter is 18+

And there exist gore/sex games, which can be action or puzzles or sports or anything (anything but educational haha) but because of its "extreme" content imho you should never merge with Hello Kitty games even if these are action or puzzle or anything too and imho should go to 18+.


But new genres is an issue we should touch only after we understand the true problem: The actual GPDB could turn into a mess in the near future if the organization is not improved.

The problem i list with the Puyo tale in my first post (go and read it again) is just an early symptom.

[eridani]

devilhunter, on 12 February 2012 - 04:16 PM, said:

Any example where this happens?
Also the report site problems is for something like that.

Go look for "The Witcher"^link or only "witch" and you will got nothing. It is a common problem, it happened to me at least 3 times before with different titles. Also, now that you mention it, i will use the Report Website Problems too haha.

[devilhunter]

eridani, on 13 February 2012 - 03:00 AM, said:

Go look for "The Witcher"^link or only "witch" and you will got nothing. It is a common problem, it happened to me at least 3 times before with different titles. Also, now that you mention it, i will use the Report Website Problems too haha.

Works for me.
Go to the search field, select Port Database, enter Witcher and press enter.
Remember to select Port Database, or else it will search around in the module you are in now and find nothing.
But even then you can select the port database tab on the left side to search there.

What other stuff can't you find?

[Hrachya]

"It is an action-puzzle game, it is both."
No its arcade.

"Tekkenlink is an arcade-fighting game, aswell as KoFlink is; both are far different from Assassin's Creedlink which you say "goes to action" "

Ok, but both include action so they go to action category.

"You are just guessing..."

? No im not

"Music games like Dance dance revolution, Audiosurf, etc."

Well then write music


"So Touhou, Ikaruga, Space Invaders, Duck Hunt!!!, etc. are 18+?"

Those are arcade, not action.


"And there exist gore/sex games, which can be action or puzzles or sports or anything (anything but educational haha) but because of its "extreme" content imho you should never merge with Hello Kitty games even if these are action or puzzle or anything too and imho should go to 18+."

Ok Fallout New Vegas is 18+ like 90% of other shooter games. So u are telling me, that all the 18+ games should go to 18+ section? Everything is gonna get totally mixed up, and its going to complicate things more.

[Hrachya]

Also in gta iv you could have sex, or get a hj. So you want to move it from action to 18+? In fallout i could shoot someone and get his arm broken, so it goes to 18+ even though its an rpg?

[eridani]

Hrachya, on 13 February 2012 - 08:36 AM, said:

- "It is an action-puzzle game, it is both."
- No its arcade.
...

^Photo Okay... At this early point it doesn't matter that much if it is a shooter, puzzle, music or rhythm, action, arcade, fighting or sport or even a porn game; but lets say it is "Arcade".

Well, even "Arcade" is not in the actual list of game genres, right?.

And as of now, if any game doesn't match a category it goes to "Other", right?.

Well, lets say. One day some people ported a bunch of "Dance Dance Revolution like" games, those goes to "Other".

The next day some other people ported a bunch of "Tetris like" games, and these goes to "Other".

The 3rd day some more persons ported a bunch of "Mario Party like" games, and these goes to "Other" aswell.

The last day, some freak ported a bunch of "Learn Math like" games, and these goes to "Other" too.

So why is Dance Dance Revolution and Learn Math in the same category?!, "Other" is now a mess, right? How i'm supposed to find a game SIMILAR to Learn Math in that mess, if i don't know
the title?, because you see, those Learn Math like games which that freak ported before are now next to Mario Party and Dance Dance Revolution.

And that is for the future. But today the same is happening to the "Action" category; go and find 3 KoF like games (of which you don't know the name) and tell me how long it took to you.

If we had a "Beat 'em Up" category (name proposed by Cybershark instead of fighting) would have taken only some seconds to find all 3 unknown games.

About the 18+ thingie, i gotta go so lets leave it for later hehe.

[HiPhish]

The problem is not where to put a certain game, the problem is that current categories can get too large. It's the same reason that FPS is not part of Action, but its own category.

Hrachya, on 13 February 2012 - 08:39 AM, said:

Also in gta iv you could have sex, or get a hj. So you want to move it from action to 18+? In fallout i could shoot someone and get his arm broken, so it goes to 18+ even though its an rpg?

18+ means "tits & gore" in a visual sense, i. e. if you can see it, not if it's just implied. In The Witcher the sex scenes are just implied, it's not an actual porno. If you break someone's arm and that's it, that's not gore; if you rip out their spine and blood flows everywhere, that's gore.

[syao]

Concerning the search feature, I currently don't like it at all. I hate the 4-letter minimum word length limit, and I'll probably take it down to zero unless there's a valid reason for it to stay as it is.
The reason is that one might want to search stuff like "GTA", "CSI", "MW3", "MDK 2", X-Men" and such. I might even want to search "a", and I see no reason why IPB should prevent me from doing so.

Concerning the 18+ games category, it's something I've thought about in past. This is what I came up with:
- 18+ games don't mix well together in some categories. Some times they even have NSFW cover art I wouldn't like to see in the PDB unless I explicitly opted in to see it.
- A category for those games alone would be quite hard to handle. I would have loved categories being like tags, so that one game can be put in more than one category at the same time, but we have to stick with what we have. A multi-category modification would be too big to handle, and it'd break after every update (we'd better ditch the current port database system completely and rewrite it from scratch if we were to do this modification - but that's not gonna happen, we'd need more developers with more free time).
- I'd opt for a "PG Rating" field in the port database. Just like you can set the graphics card ragints or the engine type for a port, you could also set its ESRB rating by picking from a drop-down menu (or PEGI, or CERO, I don't care which one, as long as we stick to one). And in the profile setting we could add a matchng drop-down menu to choose the max rating the user should be able to see when they browse the db.

[devilhunter]

syao, on 13 February 2012 - 07:48 PM, said:

Concerning the search feature, I currently don't like it at all. I hate the 4-letter minimum word length limit, and I'll probably take it down to zero unless there's a valid reason for it to stay as it is.
The reason is that one might want to search stuff like "GTA", "CSI", "MW3", "MDK 2", X-Men" and such. I might even want to search "a", and I see no reason why IPB should prevent me from doing so.

Concerning the 18+ games category, it's something I've thought about in past. This is what I came up with:
- 18+ games don't mix well together in some categories. Some times they even have NSFW cover art I wouldn't like to see in the PDB unless I explicitly opted in to see it.
- A category for those games alone would be quite hard to handle. I would have loved categories being like tags, so that one game can be put in more than one category at the same time, but we have to stick with what we have. A multi-category modification would be too big to handle, and it'd break after every update (we'd better ditch the current port database system completely and rewrite it from scratch if we were to do this modification - but that's not gonna happen, we'd need more developers with more free time).
- I'd opt for a "PG Rating" field in the port database. Just like you can set the graphics card ragints or the engine type for a port, you could also set its ESRB rating by picking from a drop-down menu (or PEGI, or CERO, I don't care which one, as long as we stick to one). And in the profile setting we could add a matchng drop-down menu to choose the max rating the user should be able to see when they browse the db.

@syao

The minimum character search count is  for avoiding bloating up the database with uneccesary words and avoiding delivering crap results via search. 
I've tried this in the past, and the results were horrible. 

The lowest setting that is recommended is 4, to avoid unnecessary stuff like 'the'. 
I'd advise against tinkering with The search, unless you want to risk it breaking entirely. 

The search can be set down to 0 on very small boards, but on boards with lots of content and users (like this one) it would do much more bad than good. 

Plus, lowering the search character limit will really strangle the php database, and we cannot use that now. Current usage is still to high. 
I think this counts as a valid reason.

[syao]

Yeah, it indeed is a valid reason, haha. I can also add the IPB search system really sucks if it works like that. I'll check on some testserver how the searches and search indexes are handled I guess.

[Hrachya]

HiPhish, on 13 February 2012 - 05:03 PM, said:

The problem is not where to put a certain game, the problem is that current categories can get too large. It's the same reason that FPS is not part of Action, but its own category.


18+ means "tits & gore" in a visual sense, i. e. if you can see it, not if it's just implied. In The Witcher the sex scenes are just implied, it's not an actual porno. If you break someone's arm and that's it, that's not gore; if you rip out their spine and blood flows everywhere, that's gore.

Ok, yesterday i shot someone in the neck with my sniper and blood flowed everywhere with his spine and arm jumping out of his body covering an incent person with blood. So fallout 3 and new vegas go to 18+ category? In prototype i cut someone in half, with blood everywhere and organs falling down, so from action it goes to 18+?

[syao]

Actually, according to the PEGI rating, both Fallout 3 and New Vegas are 18-restricted.
That's why I suggested to have a different way to label them rather than a separate category.

In any case, please stop fighting about it.

[eridani]

HiPhish, on 13 February 2012 - 05:03 PM, said:

... The problem is that current categories can get too large. It's the same reason that FPS is not part of Action, but its own category...

Yah =)

syao, on 13 February 2012 - 07:48 PM, said:

- I'd opt for a "PG Rating" field in the port database. Just like you can set the graphics card ratings or the engine type for a port, you could also set its ESRB rating by picking from a drop-down menu... And in the profile setting we could add a matching drop-down menu to choose the max rating the user should be able to see when they browse the DB.

How nice you two were able to see the real problem and to set out it in a better way.

Anw, I'll be happy with that sensitive content management system, i think its a really cool solution, hope it is realizable. Of course everyone should be on SFW by default.

[hmtinc]

I think its fine as it is

[devilhunter]

Joining the discussion.

I currently fail to see the use for this, for PC ports in the port database.
It's not like you download things here and run them immediately, you have to provide the content yourself. At least for wrappers, and due to mega uploads meltdown and the 'retirement' of some previously active full game uploaders, not much content is there other than wrappers.
A Wrapper is just a dumb app that is not working alone, and you have to buy (or download) the content yourself.
Cashiers won't sell you Carmageddon or quake if you are under 18 for example, and if you download this somewhere, well, that's their problem.
Few people also post gory pictures for their ports in the PDB, and they are all thumbnailed anyway in a post.

So what is so dangerous here that people at work or minors should not need to see?

It's on my to-do list to make a category for adult (porn) games, but the way I wanted to implement this is hard to pull off, and syao and me will need to ponder on this a while how to do it; but currently other things that don't work so well here have priority...

[devilhunter]

I meant joining the conversation, not ending it...
sigh, i'm the thread killer

[cluthz]

I totally agree with Devilhunter here.
There is no need to restrict things more.
As far as I know the license agreement on this site says you have to be 14 years or older (correct me if I'm mistaken)
and you need the get the game yourself as Devilhunter already pointed out.

A screenshot from Dead Island in a port should not be a problem, and you can go on youtube or IGN and see full gameplay videos from the same game.
As for an adult section, well not my cup of tea, but it could be "locked up" by people setting their age in User CP (although you cannot verify it) or a system where you had to PM a mod to get access (plus a neat little badge under your avatar that says "perv" )

[HairaideJinMasta]

I agree with devilhunter as well but I think eridani has a good point in the genre issue. Are you guys gonna leave it as is? I decided to post this because I guess that there is not a place for EVERYTHING but for most of the things.

[devilhunter]

About extra Categories for games?
Yes that can be arranged, but currently not now. We don't have so much Ports yet where we would need to split things further up now. Later when there is (much) more content.

Older Ports that get pushed to the next pages in a category are not clearly so visible as new ones, but these are available via search, via the random file bar at the bottom of the PDB, and via the 'similar Ports' at the bottom from a Port; plus accessing the Members Profile and looking for them there.