I was thinking of this topic again thinking in light of "what games can I find out more information about and possibly play" rather than just hoping I blindly stumble upon something. There are some sites that offer one-shot pages about games and their development but I was looking for a more general site.
One of the (many) problems of video games today is that there's of course a lot of stuff out there and despite attempts at curation and word of mouth for good games, there's very few places that have a broad overview of titles, both current and legacy.
Video game magazines, sort of used to do this (I imagine that retro magazine out of the UK does something similar), and picking up an old issue of Nintendo Power gives a good idea of what games were like in whatever era you picked it up and see what draws your fancy. But most of the video game magazines as we knew them are dead and the ones that are still around aren't very good. I don't even know if PC Gamer has all the reviews in their print version, and it's abysmal. They cover AAA games and rarely say anything bad about them, if I didn't know any better I'd be considering
Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.
Moreover, they don't seem to be tapped into the vast quantity that Steam offers, so no look at promising indie/early access titles or even the strange port/re-release that comes out of the ether (like
Felix the Cat).
I've mentioned HG101 in the first page of this thread and I don't know where I first found it or whatever site put it in my head that HG101 was a good site or why I should pay attention to it, but before its unfortunate redesign and SJW-induced deterioration checked off all the boxes.
The first one was that it had an easy-to-read list that covered everything on the site, a big giant list of all features past and present.
The second one was that there was a broad selection of content, featuring more mainstream stuff and more obscure stuff. For some games they had screenshots of all the ports and which ones looked and played the best (for games made before the mid-1990s this was a big thing).
The third one was that there was actual writing, describing the game as it was (oftentimes over-selling it) without trying to apply a number to it or rambling endlessly for hours. This is also why most YouTube videos suck, nothing is going to kill my interest faster than a boring retard yap for hours on end about why a game is good or bad.
Unfortunately, the first one is gone, the list is now in 11 pages and triple-spaced with 15 pt. font. The second and third are effectively gone; the guy who runs it was a SJW long before Trump and that kind of raging faggotry caused the site to deteriorate--rarely updates (despite having a user contribution base, who knows what he's sitting on), can no longer manage to separate his reviews from his political views and revealed to have shit-tier taste, and sucks off any indie game that he can mutually benefit from. (A
lot of Yahtzee parallels at play here).
With knowing what I originally liked it about it, I set out to find something similar.
/v/'s Recommended Games Wiki, despite having little to do with the board that inspired (it's *possible* that some of the original descriptions date back to posts lost to time, some content is from 2009, but these have all been modified over time) has some perks to it. The Miraheze format has not turned into pure cancer as what is now Fandom has (which wasn't always the case, back when it was Wikicities it had a decidedly more Wikipedia-inspired layout), but it's still a wiki. It suffers from the problem of poor quality control; some games that never should've appeared on there are listed and some of the games that aren't there just aren't there (on the
NES list, it has a lot of licensed tripe but not something like
Panic Restaurant, which is fairly solid as far as platformers go). It brings to mind one of HG101's strengths, comparing multiplats for the best versions and which ones suck. In the case of older consoles like Intellivision it lists almost exclusively arcade ports (all of which are inferior to the real things) and not interesting, original titles like Imagic's
Microsurgeon. It also suffers from HG101's problem of trying to oversell mediocre games (but without the writing to back it up, just a paragraph).
Another promising but ultimately disappointing candidate came from a site I found,
The King of Grabs. Starting from December 2017 to the most recent/last post in September
The King of Grabs has racked up information on (seemingly) 2,230 games (thanks ChatGPT) which is impressive but the blog format makes it hard to parse for information. Even trying to look up
Doom (1993) and you'll get eight separate entries for the original DOS game and various ports (3DO, Saturn, Sega 32X, GBA, Atari Jaguar, SNES, and PlayStation). It briefly describes some of the games but doesn't go into much detail...and when it comes to Doom for the 32X doesn't even mention the
questionable music and not even softballing it with "it suffers from the limitations of the original Genesis soundchip and was not able to take advantage of the 32X's features".
Finally, we have something like
Ross's Game List, which does briefly explore some of the more obscure recent-ish stuff from GOG and Steam (as well as even a few Itch.io titles) that interest him but it rarely goes into detail as to
why he likes them (or not), not even a sentence or two as to why it might be interesting. There's also not a lot of older games, seems like someone with a strong legacy of video games would have a bunch of pre-1996 titles even if some of them don't hold the test of time. They're on there, but they number less than a dozen and they're all weird titles, from obscure Mac games (
Starship Warlock and
Jump Raven) to FMV games that have gotten an LP or two for a laugh (
Burn:Cycle), and a few other oddities. No Maxis games? No adventure games? No arcade games? No console games? No strategy games? I know you're bullshitting with that, and it's even worse because his YouTube channel shows a bunch of games that ARE from that era. Just a quick glance has
Captain Zapp (misspelled as "Captain Zzap"),
Maabus,
Veil of Darkness, and
The Legend of Kyrandia. Much as I despise video game YouTubers in general I would be willing to give anyone the benefit of the doubt if they maintain—by themselves, not some Fandom wiki run by loony stans—a website that properly archived what they did on YouTube with supplemental material. (Jim Sterling does this, and even has text reviews! But...his writing is atrocious, his tastes are abysmal, and he does the video game reviewer thing where points are given and taken away for the most petty, inane bullshit reasons imaginable, and those estrogen pills make his writing that much worse. (Compare the
review for The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to the
review for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, it's like two different people!
I know I'm sperging out about a bunch of pointless shit and I'll probably get rated as Autistic but I know what I want and I'm flabbergasted that there isn't a single site that can deliver something that I want.
