Welcome, Guest  log in | register

I'll spare you the dry language of shameless self-promotion and tell you what motivated me to spend three freakin' weeks making the basic structure of the Almighty Square (and More!) Albums Database (tentative title) rather than play Metroid Prime and Animal Crossing.

There's always been information on video game albums and related to video game albums, but this information has rarely been consolidated and presented in a comphrensive manner. It's easy enough to find lyrics, album scans, and track lists, but in most cases I have to check out five or six sites to find what I need. And even for the sites that appear to have all this, the information is presented in such a desultory, uninspired manner that I wonder why the people who make these sites even bother.

Album track lists immediately come to mind. In most cases, I'll find a list of only the track names. Sometimes, they'll come with track times. But how does it mean anything? For album compilations that have music from several games, how do I know what game the music belongs to? If an album has multiple composers, how do I know who composed what? If I listen to an mp3 sample for a Japanese game I've never played, what clues are there to help me understand the context in which the music is played? The answer is easy. In many cases, sites simply do not provide that information.

As a nerd who pretends to know Japanese, I always regard the track names themselves with suspicion. Are these the actual Japanese track names in Japanese, or are they actually in English? Most sites don't tell you. If they're in English, are they really spelled that way? ("Passiong Moment"?) You can't tell with most sites. If they're translated, why the hell should they be passed off as fact when they're actually translations? Most sites do it, anyway. How do I find the original track lists? Virtually no English sites do, so your only recourse is to wade through Google searches to find what you need.

And another thing! Sites usually can tell me who the composers are for a given album. But how do I find out immediately what other albums they composed or even direct me to the composers' biographies? In most cases, they don't. How do I find out about albums similar to the one I'm looking at? Most sites will make you guess.

And one more thing! Sites usually provide links to online retailers so that I can buy albums and said sites can receive their paltry commission. But how do I access these links quickly? Can't someone put all the freakin' links on one page?

The information's all out there, so why doesn't anyone put it all together? This is what I had in mind for track lists:

• Track lists that...
  • tell you briefly about a track's in-game context. (I can't describe it in extensive detail; play the game for that!)
  • tell you where in the game one can actually listen to it
  • have the track times
  • tell you what games they're related to (if the album is a compilation)

After I thought a little bit about track lists, I thought "what the hell," threw up my hands, and decided to incorporate original (Japanese) track lists in text form (actual Japanese, Shift JIS encoding, not transliterated), composer profiles, lyrics, album media, "factoids" (trivia related to the albums) and user reviews. In the final stage, anyway.

Yes, I'm not saying that my little project has done things right... yet. In fact, for many of the albums that I have put up, the track information is woefully incomplete. (A prototypical example of what an album page should look like.) I haven't included album media, links, or user reviews just yet. But the structure is there and I can add to it later.

With that in mind, I encourage everyone to provide feedback about what you think can be added or improved. I'm confident that exposing the feature to criticism will allow me to improve upon it in ways that I could never have considered. Or, you can lavish blind praise upon me. Your choice!

Forums / News / Some guy on winter break spends entire winter break in seclusion making album database... for VIDEO GAMES