RF Generation Message Board

It would be great if Related Games would automatically be transferred to games that are connected via Variation Tie-in.

I was just thinking about this again today. No thoughts at all?

Never saw this the first time around but it definitely makes sense.

I don't remember seeing this before either.

But yes, I agree it would be very nice. The Related Games section is woefully underused, and I think the major reason is because it is very time consuming to add multiple related games to each other. This would certainly speed the process up.

I know we've thought about having related games automatically tie together like variation tie ins do, but it would never work because it would end up where everything would be tied together as they'd eventually share common tie-ins. Kind of like how everyone is connected to Kevin Bacon.
But I don't think we've ever thought about doing it this way. This way should work, as long as its possible to code.

My thoughts would be to use it when games have been released on multiple platforms. It would be nice to have a way to see all of the places the same title was offered.

But you can already do that by doing a DB search for a title without selecting a console? You can also select North America (Regionwide) as region if you don't want all the European variants to clog up your results.

I understand it can be done with searches, but a game can be the same and have different names in different regions (e.g. Shadow Warriors, Ninja Gaiden, Ninja Ryukenden).

Isn't that what the "Alternative Title" field is there for? If you fill that in, a game will still show up when you search for the different title.

But I do like the idea. Shadow would probably know how difficult it is to implement.

That is also possible. I just thought that the variation tie-in field works so well and is so easy to use, and the related games field is clunky in comparison. Maybe there was/is another purpose to it that I'm not thinking about.

Japanese titles are supposed to be romanized.
Alternative Title should be for an alternate spelling(Katamari Damacy, Katamari Damashi comes to mind) or the (combination of) kanji/hiragana/kana/katakana that actually appears on the box. It should not be the title of the game used in other countries.


You wouldn't list Super Mario Bros. 2 as an alt title of Doki Doki Panic for example.
However Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic "(夢工場ドキドキパニック?, lit. "Dream Factory: Heart-Pounding Panic")" - Those in "" would be acceptable alternate titles.

However Super Mario Bros 2 would be an acceptable Related Game.

To Izret: :'(

Unfortunately, we'd need to increase the size of the Alternate Title field to even get close to supporting the full Japanese name, let alone all the regional names. The size on the database would increase by a non-trivial amount, but nothing we couldn't support. Not sure what kind of impact on performance it would have...discussing how we'd do this with the staff.

It shouldn't?!? That's news to me.

I'm sure I've seen it used like that ocassionally. And I've probably used it myself a handful of times for that purpose - because I thought it was ok.

Anyway, good to know. And if that's the case, the Related games could certainly benefit from some increased user-friendliness.

There isn't really any hard rules for Alternate Title. Titles from other countries is perfectly acceptable.

Not according to Izret though. Didn't you read his post?

Mike > Anthony. :P

Gotcha! :D

Chain of command and all that :-P

I prefer to go with "more info is better than less info" than just because I said so.

I'll hope that with an improved Related Games section, that Alternative Title can have a more defined use. I'm just glad this is getting another look. :D