Anyone use a "Selective" Rom Collection? (Rather than trying to own everything)

[newyears1978]

1 hour ago, Zombeaver said:

thatsthejoke.jpg

I'd say all of those are better than their scores suggest. That's my point. There are plenty of games that weren't well-received critically (overall) that are good (and vice versa). Now if you have a specific reviewer that you've followed for a long time that you've come to trust, I think that's a little bit different. Getting their opinion on it, when you've established that it's one that you're generally in sync with, is a much better indicator than an aggregate made up of a bunch of people that you don't know. I really like ACG on Youtube, for example. If he says something's great or that it's shit, I'm usually on the same page with him; not always, but it's a good starting point. Meanwhile you have sites factoring into the aggregate score that could be made up primarily of asshats - IGN gave God Hand a 3/10...

Two Worlds was awful though
I agree that sorting by scores might cause you to miss "some" good games, but honestly it's still a valid method IMO because if the goal is to filter down to mostly or all good games..you're still likely never going to play every game on the system, so if you missed a few here or there..it doesn't really matter (for me that is)

 

------------------
All great posts in here. What I have been doing is looking up some sites I trust and getting Top 100 lists for consoles (or Top 20 or 50 if smaller systems).

I start by moving those games to a folder. Then I watch several "Hidden Gem" lists on YT of YouTubers I trust like AVGN or Metal Jesus, etc. I move those games over.

Then I look up RPG games for that system and move all of those (because I just want all RPG, good or bad)

Lastly - I look over the remaining games and move any that I have any personal attachment to be it that I rented/owned it growing up or Nostalgia, etc.

So far I have done 2600, NES, SNES and cut those libraries down drastically.  I think for instance (am not at home right now) my SNES is down to 200-300 instead of 800, same for NES...and I think 2600 ended up with like 50 or so.

Much better for me anyway. Very nice to scroll through LB to see good games and interesting games rather than random crap I have no interest to play.

[Zombeaver]

On 1/9/2018 at 3:16 PM, newyears1978 said:

Two Worlds was awful though

No it's not! It lacks some polish for sure, but it's actually pretty great. The voice acting is turbo-cheesy, but it adds way more charm than it detracts (it's actually pretty funny). It was marketed very poorly with an awful slogan of something like "Oblivion on steroids", which started a lot of people off on the wrong foot, but I'm not going to hold that against it. It's got a huge open world, a Diablo loot system which, admittedly, I'm a sucker for, and some genuinely interesting quests that have ramifications. It also has an awesome magic system where you can create your own (overpowered) spells. I had a genuine, non-ironic blast with it. I honestly don't think people gave it a fair chance.

Cringey, 7-year-old video I made that should (sortof) get my point across at least [language warning]:

 

[newyears1978]

I actually was HYPED for several months for that game..I pre-purchased it and when I got it I was so disappointed. The gameplay was so awful I barely lasted a few hours. Maybe if I had given it a shot for awhile I could have gotten used to it, but to me it was just so bad I couldn't even stomach it..haha!  I think the wonky animations and bugs and gameplay just did it in..made it hard to  "give a chance" you know?

 

I will watch the video when I get home

[Zombeaver]

Honestly, I didn't play it until several years after it came out specifically because it got so thoroughly shit on in reviews. I saw it on sale for cheap on GOG one day, saw a lot of reviews that said something to the effect of "It's flawed but you should still check it out," and just kinda figured "Eh, what the hell... let's give it a go," and then found myself completely surprised by it. I wasn't hyped at all (and maybe therein lies the difference), because I went in expecting it to be pretty awful based on what I'd read and heard, but was very pleasantly surprised. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it gets a lot of things right. I mentioned it because when the concept of "games you loved that critics hated" comes up it's probably the first thing that comes to mind for me.

Some of my favorite games ever are deeply flawed - games like Anachronox, Arx Fatalis, the Gothic series, and Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines have plenty of problems (VTM:B was literally a broken mess at launch) - but they get a whole lot of things right, and have a ton of charm, and you can tell a lot of passion went into them. I certainly wouldn't put Two Worlds on quite the same pedestal, but its good points definitely outweighed the bad for me.

[newyears1978]

See, I actually liked the other games you listed, I think I own Gothic on GOG still and I played Arx and Anachronox as well - and I absolutely loved Vampire.

Maybe I could go back and play it and see what it feels like today. I would probably compare it to other games though that might by my downfall..comparing it to like Dragon's Dogma or something... (at least in the controls and appearance)

[Zombeaver]

There are just certain things you have to accept - the voice acting and dialogue are... unique. I actually love it, but a lot of people hated it; and while I disagree, I understand why they hate it. I think you have to go in with the mindset that you know the dialogue and voice acting will be like some kind of cheesy fantasy movie, and you'll have a better time. The game's very open-ended, and while it has a central story in the same sense that an Elder Scrolls game has a story, by and large you're just kindof set free in this giant fantasy world to do as you wish. It doesn't make a very good first impression, and things kindof start slow in the sortof typical "Oh, you're a dude fighting wolves in ye olde forest." but as you progress, build up your character with better equipment (it has a really neat equipment combination system where you can basically power up gear with lesser gear, so "trash" equipment can actually be useful), and learn new skills and spells, things open up more and more. And like I said, there are some actually really interesting quests that went in directions I did not expect (the video has an example).

There's one quest where you come to this isolated village, and when you talk to the people, all of them are terrified. They won't tell you much, but you're able to gather that some nearby giants have been harassing them and they're afraid they'll destroy the village. They beg you not to fight them, saying that it'll only make things worse. They just want you to leave.

"But... I'm the hero. I have to save the day," is what every game ever has pounded into my brain. So, of course, I find their cave nearby, and kill all the giants. Hurray! I'm the hero!

...when you get back to the village, there are several more giants that have killed all the villagers. You can kill them, of course, but everyone in the town is now dead.

Most games like this just kindof train you to "Do the right thing!" which usually entails killing some big bad. Doing what I'd come to interpret as "the right thing" didn't have the outcome I expected.

That's just a random one-off event that has nothing whatsoever to do with the main story at all.

23 minutes ago, newyears1978 said:

comparing it to like Dragon's Dogma or something

I wouldn't compare it to Dragon's Dogma beyond the fact that it's a fantasy setting in a pretty open world. I love the hell out of Dragon's Dogma though - played the shit out of that game (multiple times).

[pezley]

I have a very specific selection of games

firstly - Top 25 from metatcritic etc for each platform

secondly - memorable games that only mean something to me

Some platforms like PS1 & Arcade which had a huge library of top games I have upped the limit from 25 to 50. I just want a selection of games which defines each platform

 

[IamSullee]

I kinda taking a selective approach to games. 

[CTRL-ALT-DEFEAT]

It's funny, I have a mostly curated collection across 40ish platforms/computers and approached it from the standpoint of "would I actually ever play this?" and, for the most part, I don't really play the old games as much or as often as I thought I would. I largely stick to playing games in my ever growing Steam/GOG/Origin/Uplay libraries... with exception to Super Metroid and various hacks of it and a few other games, it's really become more of a novelty and the "fun" I am having with them has largely revolved around the cherry picking of games I would play/wanted but didn't have as a kid and the whole "setup" of learning how to configure the emulators, configure the middlewares and front-ends, getting all the artwork and making video themes.

I am largely done with adding anything else outside of newer PC titles, and once I am done creating video themes for my collection, I want to dig into getting a really elaborate Hyper Pause setup through RocketLauncher for each system.

I have paltry collection of games compared to a lot of people (1TB of a 2TB drive carries my entire LB/BB and emu+ROMs/Discs collections) and I may even pare it down more.

 

Edited January 23, 2018 by CTRL-ALT-DEFEAT

[FreeSoftwareServers]

I have between 10 and 11K games and I JUST figured out how to activate the wheel function, for "random games". This is something I'm looking forward to, but I'm well aware that I almost enjoy collecting roms and LB more then playing most old games. I've probably played under 25/50 games from that list of 10K. I have also found that LB/BB is quite a bit slower with all those images/videos/mp3s etc to load when I scroll, though its become faster with caching as I use it. I do load over a "networked drive" but its really just a Linux VM residing on the same computer running Linux Software Raid *MDADM*, so it shouldn't be *much* slower. Generally the wheel takes like 10/20 seconds to spin correctly, then works just fine after that. But, I'm never going back to a "selective setup" and I just hope somehow LB/BB can optimize the code and also, the hardware will be able to perform much faster in a few years. 

I do run a high end rig, but its still pretty slow. I7-6700K w/ 1TB SSD, but games are on 15TB Raid5 HDD's on same machine w/ 64GB DDR4 Ram.

 

Here is a demo of my setup, which I love BTW. Great work, setup was a breeze vs HyperSpin.

BigBox Griddles BoxView - Customized Setup

[JamesBond@ge]

6 hours ago, FreeSoftwareServers said:

Here is a demo of my setup, which I love BTW. Great work, setup was a breeze vs HyperSpin.

BigBox Griddles BoxView - Customized Setup

I like what you have done there with the controller diagrams on each platform. How did you do this? Did you create the pictures yourself?

[Asparky]

It appears the Controller Diagrams, may be taken from an upload i've done in the past, though I may be Mistaken:

 

 

Edited January 23, 2018 by Asparky

[FreeSoftwareServers]

8 hours ago, JamesBond@ge said:

I like what you have done there with the controller diagrams on each platform. How did you do this? Did you create the pictures yourself?

This comes as part of Griddles BoxView theme. I picked it for that + I really like the Bold icon in the corner that says "Max Players 1,2,4" etc. Helps me know if I want to try the game if I have friends gaming. I changed a bit in his theme tho, most of the platform icons and videos I added myself.

[candre23]

While I have complete (or at least as complete as I can get) romsets for every system, I've found that having them all in a frontend makes you "spoiled for choice".  Instead, I've been trying to curate a Greatest Hits collection for each system and only importing those into launchbox.  I've waded through a bunch of "top xx games for such-and-such-console" web sites and blog posts, and added a few personal favorites.  I've tried to keep it to ~100 games for the big systems, and 20-30 for the smaller systems that never had deep catalogs.  I've also tried to dedupe across platforms, so for instance I only have Mortal Kombat for Sega Genesis, and not for the half-dozen other systems that also received ports.

It's still a lot of games - almost 3k so far, and I'm still going back and re-adding stuff as I think of it - but it's a lot more manageable. 

[shinra358]

I only have the games I like. Community ratings are useless to me because I only have the games I like so if I have them, I know I like them and don't need help deciding for myself

There's not that much hdd space in the world to get every game. And no one wants to play bad games.

[cleverest]

1 hour ago, shinra358 said:

I only have the games I like. Community ratings are useless to me because I only have the games I like so if I have them, I know I like them and don't need help deciding for myself

There's not that much hdd space in the world to get every game. And no one wants to play bad games.

Ahhh but many love to collect them, a bragging rights thing I guess.

[damageinc86]

I like having full collections just because it's fun to say you have every single game made for a system, especially when someone says, "do you have THIS game?"  Yes every single one! Lol.  But it does really get old going through them all.  I'd like to get it down to exclusives to that system/best versions only. But it's a lot of work.  And a lot of the lists out there have people arguing about which ones were really exclusive, and adding new stuff all the time.

[neil9000]

I have the no-intro sets all in my games folder, but I only ever "mostly" import the (USA) roms into Launchbox, even though I'm in England. I just like to have the 60fps versions of the games, then if there are any (EUR) exclusive games I hear of or a really good (JAP) game that is playable despite the language I import those manually.

[candre23]

23 minutes ago, cleverest said:

Ahhh but many love to collect them, a bragging rights thing I guess.

Why not both?  My total collection is a bit under 11TB and consists of ~350k files.  Like with pokemon, gotta catch em all.

But it would be overwhelming to have all those ROMs in launchbox.  These are complete romsets, so there are a ton of versions/dupes.  Most Japanese games are unplayable unless you can read Japanese (which I don't).  A lot of the old computer stuff isn't even games, and even much of what is doesn't lend itself well to my livingroom setup.  Hell, I have a bunch of old mainframe and minicomputer software that isn't even emulatable at this time.

It's important to me to have it all, but it's counterproductive to have it all in launchbox.  That's why I hoard everything, but I'm selective as to what I import.

Edited January 31, 2018 by candre23

[Agent47]

For most cart and computer systems I have all the games on my PC but don't have all of them added to my frontend. Yes, some people like to have every game just to boast but for me it's a "what if?" thing. Like damage mentioned when having friends over to play some of them like games I don't so being able to quickly add them is great since I already have the game.

The main thing for me is unless you've sat down and played every single one of the hundreds of thousands of games there's bound to be some games you'll really like that you've overlooked and I'd like the ability to stumble upon them. There are some things I could safely delete and have no worries about missing (text adventures for example) but drives are relatively cheap.