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Last active July 23, 2024 03:20
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bad-data.md

This file is a collection of video games with bad data online, for eventually doing a talk about all the weird things I've found while data wrangling.

The Bad IGDB Release Date Import

There seems to be a large number of records in IGDB imported from MobyGames (or GiantBomb?) years ago which all have a one-off error on the month of their publication date. I assume an error was made years ago in an IGDB import script that caused an off-by-one in the month of all these games when they were imported from some other source. There are dozens of games I've found with this problem, there may even be hundreds or thousands with this problem, I'm not really sure.

- title: Bakusou Dekotara Densetsu for Wonderswan
  wikidata_url: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q122388448
  igdb_url: https://www.igdb.com/games/bakusou-dekotora-densetsu
  mobygames_url: https://www.mobygames.com/game/21553/bakuso-dekotora-densetsu-for-wonderswan/
  giantbomb_url: https://www.giantbomb.com/bakusou-dekotara-densetsu-for-wonderswan/3030-9483/
  mobygames_date: Dec 29, 1999
  igdb_date: Jan 29, 2000
- title: Iron Phoenix
  wikidata_url: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q115459087
  igdb_url: https://www.igdb.com/games/iron-phoenix
  mobygames_url: https://www.mobygames.com/game/18560/iron-phoenix/
  giantbomb_url: https://www.giantbomb.com/wd/3030-12034/
  mobygames_date: Mar 25, 2005
  igdb_date: Apr 25, 2005

Release dates and time zones

I know a lot about time zones from working on therapy appointment scheduling code for a few years. I hate time zones. So much.

Anyway, how do you handle time zones for a video game release date! It usually doesn't matter that much, but sometimes it leads to discrepancies that are hard to resolve.

For example, Extinction.

Interestingly, GameSpot includes the specific timestamp on their article, and it was published at... 9PM Pacific Time on April 9. So... April 10 in Eastern time and UTC. Great. Cool.

So here's a tangent: If you release a game at 11:59pm Pacific time on January 1, how should you determine the release date? Does it matter if the developer or publisher are in Pacific time? Should we base it off the developer's locale? What if the developer has employees distributed across the world?

If you're a storefront, do you store release dates or release times? If you're Steam and a game developer releases a game on April 9, 2018 in Pacific time, but in Europe the Unix timestamp corresponds to a time in the morning on April 10, 2018, which do you display? Is it confusing to display different dates to different users? Or even different dates to the same user if they go between different time zones?

Does any of this matter? Not really, honestly. It's certainly an interesting question, though. Time is messy.

Games that reuse their Steam IDs

This happens a lot with annual releases of sports simulator/manager games. For example, Astonishing Baseball Manager (https://www.igdb.com/games/astonishing-baseball-22 and https://www.igdb.com/games/astonishing-baseball-manager-21) has games in its series that just reuse the same Steam App ID. This is... fine for the user, I guess? But it makes cataloguing the games as unique entries in their series rather difficult.

Definitive/Deluxe Edition Upgrades

Super Hiking League

Super Hiking League and Super Hiking League DX:

They seemingly renamed this by adding "DX" to the name when they released a major update for it and ported it to consoles. They essentially automatically upgraded the game for everyone that owned it. This leads to... weird data issues as many third-party databases don't handle this very well or don't get updated to reflect the changes.

Firegirl: Hack 'n Splash Rescue

Firegirl: Hack 'n Splash Rescue and Firegirl: Hack 'n Splash Rescue DX:

Same as above, renamed the game and different databases handle this situation in different ways, which leads to... problems.

The Librarian

The Librarian and The Librarian (Special Edition)

Essentially, seemingly same situation as the last two, although I'm not entirely sure what the additions were for the "Special Edition".

Hayles Quest aka "David Slade Mysteries: Case Files"

So, at some point the developers of this game, I guess, just scrapped the game they were working on and pivoted to this other thing? But for some reason they reused the Steam App ID from Hayles Quest, and just renamed it and changed the entire game's page. The problem is, any databases that scraped the old Steam page created a record for "Hayles Quest", and now that Steam ID was being used for this other game called "David Slade Mysteries: Case Files".

And it's not just that they renamed the game or anything, it's an entirely different game. The original seems to be have been some sort of third-person fantasy game, while "David Slade Mysteries: Case Files" is a murder mystery VR game, I think?

But then... it gets weirder. The game screenshots on IGDB say in the bottom right corner "Hayles Quest" and then "including GoreBall - Remastered". What is GoreBall, you might ask? Well it has the exact same screenshots as Hayles Quest did. I guess they were remastering their game "GoreBall" and that turned into its own thing which they renamed to "Hayles Quest", or something?

Gear Worx Productions facebook page has more stuff on it if you go back to 2019ish. Very odd.

Maybe trying to dodge the $100 Steam game fee idk

Kevin's Path to Wizdom

This game was renamed at some point during development, which lead to fun problems connecting databases together.

The Counter-Strike 2 Problem

In 2011, Valve and Hidden Path Entertainment released Counter-Strike: Global Offensive to the world. It had a rough start, but eventually became an incredibly successful first-person shooter game and eSport, with teams from around the world competing in tournaments for large cash prizes, and a massive in-game economy based on in-game cosmetics for your weapons.

Valve announced in early 2023 the upcoming release of a new game in the Counter-Strike series: Counter-Strike 2.

The game had many of the maps, guns, game modes, and all cosmetic skins from CS:GO, but upgraded from Source 1 to Source 2, with new lighting systems, a lot of new networking code, many redesigned/upgraded maps, and a bunch of other new features.

On September 27, 2023, they released the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/730/CounterStrike_2/

However, the game was literally an update to CS:GO's game record in Steam. It fully renamed and rebranded it, redesigned most of the content, removed some game modes, ported over all the old cosmetics from CS:GO, but kept the same Steam application ID.

The old CS:GO was available via a "beta branch" in the Steam settings for the game, but it would only be accessible until the end of 2023 and would lack any cosmetics that players had unlocked, bought, or traded for. The matchmaking servers were also shut down by Valve with the release of CS2, so finding a game required browsing community servers manually.

So, the Steam store - and thus Valve - reuses the old Steam ID, but talk about it as a new game in the series. Most video game databases (MobyGames, IGDB, GiantBomb, etc.) treat it as a new entry in the series. Wikipedia and Wikidata have the games as separate articles/items. And the playable version of CS:GO is going to be gone at the end of the year (well, except the old PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, but those haven't been updated or sold in years anyway).

So CS2 is a distinct game from CS:GO, right? I think so, but it's definitely not as cut-and-dry as saying "Counter-Strike: Source and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are distinct games".

It also raises some questions about software preservation and the rights of Valve to take away game modes like Arms Race and Danger Zone, as they did when they released CS2 and (mostly) shut down CS:GO - even if those removals are presumably temporary. But that's not what this piece is about, so I'll let someone else talk about that.

Shadowbane

(note: Junk wants me to reference the Ship of Theseus and credit Junk)

The logo is slightly different on Steam vs Moby, and the game was originally released in 2003, but eventually re-released onto Steam after a Chinese company acquired the rights and source code for the game. Wat.

The history of this game is a mess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowbane#Closure

https://web.archive.org/web/20230610153749/https://massivelyop.com/2021/02/08/a-new-version-of-the-long-sunsetted-mmorpg-shadowbane-has-landed-on-steam/

Old games and their release dates

SnoCross 2: Featuring Blair Morgan

I have no idea what the actual release date is for this game, and I don't think it's really possible to determine it without finding people that worked on the game and trying to see if they have any records of the release date. If anyone wants to do that, be my guest.

Mythos

Mythos was originally released in 2011 as an MMO. It was re-released on Steam in 2022 as a single-player game using (I assume?) the same content.

Also there's another, entirely separate game called Mythos: The Beginning that only serves to make this situation even messier: https://store.steampowered.com/app/325320/Mythos_The_Beginning__Directors_Cut/

Cancelled/Dead Games

Readyyy!

Sega released a mobile game called 'Readyyy!' in Japan on February 1, 2019 and then shut it down on June 28, 2019. So that's funny. Anyway, there's not a ton of information about it online, but there is some. It is a 'male idol training game', similar to some other idol games that exist on mobile platforms.

It was not catalogued on IGDB, GiantBomb, or MobyGames. I've submitted it on IGDB now, though.

Different games with the same names

Games with differing names by region

Usually this is caught pretty easily, but sometimes the game is older or the different regional variants are somewhat obscured - either by loss of information to history or intentional, weird marketing decisions.

For example, Casino Mogul and Casino Tycoon: https://web.archive.org/web/20221024210953/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casino_Mogul https://web.archive.org/web/20220130113915/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casino_Tycoon_(video_game)

These were created in 2005 and 2006 respectively, they existed on Wikipedia for eighteen years before I happened upon them in December of 2023. Casino Tycoon appears to be the North American and French title, while Casino Mogul is the title in Germany. MobyGames lists them as the same game. They share the same publisher (Monte Cristo) and developer (Cat Daddy Games). And the box art, subtly, includes the same slot machine artwork with green crowns. More importantly, the back cover of the NA and German versions on MobyGames use the same three screenshots from the game, as well as some of the same graphical assets.

Due to the age of the games, I've had trouble finding a source which explicitly states that these games are the same, but I'd bet good money on this being the case. I'm not really sure how I was the first person to notice this discrepancy in English Wikipedia

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