How do you guys want to deal with multiple games with the same name by different publishers?

[Mikerochip]

I've brought it up in comments, but, there's a couple of games on the Mega Drive, and on the N64, where there is a game in two different regions, eg N64 Bomberman, with the same title, but are completely different games.

So, different game, different boxart, different publishers, different developers, etc etc.

At the time I proposed [TITLE] / [PUBLISHER] but it was rejected. The N64 one was eventually added as N64 Bomberman Arcade.

Someone renamed many of the C64 games over the last few days, to be the [GAMENAME] / [PUBLISHER] and while lots of them were approved, lots were changed back again.

In the case of the C64, there are multiple games, in the same region, with the same title, all by different publishers.

The other 8 bits are similar. Even some of the 16 bit computers have this problem.

Leaving them all in the database with the same name is confusing, and hard to scrape, since the scraper just looks at the title. Some often have the same year of release too, so, there's almost nothing to distinguish them when scraping.

(Which obviously makes it hard to pick the correct game, and then, if you combine, all games have the same ID, and are combined into the same game, when they really ought not to be)

Thoughts?

 

[kurzih]

This is an old issue:

I understand that the searching/scraping problem is one thing, but the worst issue here is that since the images/videos are saved based on the default name they would get mixed up (even if they would have a different database ID) if there is no unique default name when there's multiple identically named titles on the same platform.

The latest solution which has been used for quite some time is "Title name (Publisher)". And if there's a game named the same from the same publisher then I think the next best thing would be "Title name (Year)".  Just make sure when you make those changes you either put a link to the forum in the moderation comment field or explain the change - there's always a new moderator around the corner who might not be aware of the issue and might go on a solo journey.

What has been removed (mainly in the C64 section) is the unnecessary (duplicate) alternative name, since even that causes detection problems nowadays.
Unfortunately if someone is putting those (duplicate) alt names back, it is a mistake - but there's a bug in the comment field for alternative names and we can't seem to get the message through there:

 

Edited January 4, 2021 by kurzih