The Great Game Gauntlet 👑 DAY 5

[AstroBob]

Rules ℹ️

• For a full list of rules and details on this event, please check out our master post here
• To be eligible to win, make sure you vote on the poll and answer the question via the comments section of this post

 

DAY 5

Welcome to Day 5 of the Great Game Gauntlet! 👑 With LaunchBox embodying the spirit of collecting, we’re on a quest to discover: What makes a great video game collection? 

The final round has arrived! We’ve had some great discussions about game collections, from fantastic hypothetical releases to interesting takes on what makes these collections truly great. Now, it’s time to decide the winner. Here are the games that won each round:

• Castlevania Advance Collection
• SEGA Mega Drive & Genesis Classics 
• Tomb Raider I-III Remastered
• Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2
• Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster

There can only be one king of the collection! While all games in the prize pool have earned their spot by winning each round, the ultimate winner of this final round will have extra keys up for grabs! 🎮 👑 If you want a chance to win one of the above games, make sure to cast your vote in the poll, and answer this question:

 

 ❓Tell us some of your favorite ways to manage games in LaunchBox ❓

To close out the event, we want to hear from YOU! What’s your favorite way to manage games in LaunchBox?

This is completely open-ended—whether it’s how you organize a specific subset of games or an entire series. Maybe you’ve created unique playlists for your collections or have a killer sub-tree structure for different consoles and genres. And not just collection-style games, ANY game.

The sky’s the limit! We’re excited to see how you make the most of LaunchBox. Feel free to show off your setup if you’d like!

[AstroBob]

I’ll kick things off! For some of my favorite collection-style games, I like to create playlists that include both the collection itself and the original releases of each game it features.

It’s definitely a bit manual, but I love checking off the original releases as I complete them and easily comparing them with their remastered versions! The ‘possible ports’ feature is another great way to do this, but there’s something special about having my favorite hand-picked collections all together in one place.

 

How about you? Looking forward to hearing your tips and favorite methods. And don’t worry, this isn’t just about collection-style games—share any tidbit or trick you love to use to manage any of your games in LaunchBox!

[Psycho_Ch]

I just use the presets launchbox already has and don't mess up with many things, that's good enough for me and easy to set up, which is what I wanted in the first place with an app like this.

[zyute]

I've always had interest in translations and rom hacks. This can lead to a situation where a series can have many variations based off its releases. I found creating playlists for them helps me manage my game collection better so I don't have to sort through each system along with its games for what I want to play.

Whether it be for Sonic or any other series it would mean being able to jump into a game much faster.

Edited August 30 by zyute

[DemmyTree]

I like using the automated playlist function and set it to show as a platform on the menu, i have over 500 steam games so it felt ridiculous seeing all those games when i've only got a couple of specific ones installed. I created a playlist only containing installed games as with games like arcade, and discs, the files do not count as being installed so would be ruled out from showing installed only entries. doing this i was able to show a limited number of games installed, and then by going into the playlist entries view i could see all the uninstalled games for any i wanted to add to the small listing.

Edited August 30 by DemmyTree

[M_Behr_Auth]

I have to admit that I use Launchbox just with its plain standard without any playlists or such. That's because I gut so much work to do sorting, revising and importing my game collections for different systems.

When I'm done with that (in a decade or so 🤣) I'm definitely going to dig deeper into the organization features of Launchbox.

[chipster6502]

My work is absolutely in progress. For now I'm finishing with consoles and handhelds. I have almost every platform configured up to the eight generation except for PSVita, Nintendo 3DS, PS2, PS3 and Xbox 360. The work keeps on!

Regarding computer games I have added so far MS-DOS, C64 (using the great C64 Dreams collection), Commodore Amiga, ZX Spectrum (based on the fantastic GB64 Spectrum software database) and ScummVM (thanks LB team for the now easy installation process!)

I have also configured Arcade (MAME) and Pinball (Visual Pinball X) games.

I use the auto-import option. It's not perfect but it's a great addition to LB. I really hope they continue improving it. Depending of the platform, once I have imported the games I have to check manually those not recognized automatically to see if there is a Launchbox database ID for the games. Sometimes this is a hard job, but I don't like to have games in Big Box without any media related to them. In this case, I'm now hiding those games not referenced with the LB database to have a clean collection.

My next steps are keep adding computer systems and create custom playlists based on personal preferences. An epic task from the beginning but so much fun in it!

[TheAgentGeek]

I honestly just use plain Jane Launchbox and the favorites section. That’s where I put what I’m playing currently, games from childhood that sort of thing. That’s just because I’m the type of person who enjoys just looking at the thing like it’s Netflix not knowing what to play lol.

[Phanamatic]

The built in LaunchBox sorting is already a great starting point for me. I currently run off a desktop, but the dream is one day to hold my whole retro library in my hands. So, I always setup and envision my current LaunchBox build as if it's on a handheld device. I spend half my free time tweaking and perfecting my LaunchBox setup and the other half actually playing 😂

I always sort my games into 3 categories, being unplayed, playing and completed. I spend way too much time just looking at the beauty of the BigBox theme flipping through all the backlogged games and never knowing what to play next

Edited August 30 by Phanamatic

[rdscarlisle]

I leave mine in the platforms category. I like mine set so my dreamcast are together my arcade are together my mega drive and so on 

[Acethor]

Being completely obsessed with game metadata, I use List View as my default view together with Faeran's Big Details theme. Then I create Playlists for each game series. For me, this is the perfect balance between showcasing media and data.

[christhed]

I have a pretty standard plain Launchbox setup. The way I like to actually find games to play is to sort by Star Rating. I love how you can set the minimum amount of votes for games to show as rated. I wish games would actually be sorted by rating instead of the rating categories. Being able to filter by rating categories would be great tho.

I also like to filter for games that have achievements available. Collecting those makes me more willing to try out random retro games.

EDIT: For newer, longer games I also like sorting with HLTB data.

Edited August 30 by christhed

[WesWarlord]

I honestly just like going into Big Box and feeling like the king of castle with thousands of games. I’m not very organized in general so I’m happy to have everything laid out all at once.

[Morente]

I've been sorting games into different collections depending on how eager I am to play the game. As almost everyone else I naturally sort games into a backlog and completed categorie but try to differentiate the backlog a bit more with games that I really want to play next getting into their own collection so that I remember and in contrast to that games that I'm not htat hot on get their own label so that I don't look at them too often when I try to decide what to play next.

[MacReady0088]

For now my sorting is only based on standard platform, including region specific like Super Nintendo and Super Famicom having their own separated entries
Looking forward to grab a license and then really go ham with sorting things out for BigBox , although I don't think it will change much, as I like to scroll through whole libraries while seeing box art and getting into something new at random

[jphoots]

I have only been using Android for a minutes. I only keep about 100 games at a time and the way it's already set up is fine. 

[C-Beats]

I get pretty specific in my build. I use platform categories view and use the following hierarchy.

- Platform Category (Console, Handheld, etc)
     - Platform Manufacturer (Sony, Nintendo, etc)
          - Platform
               - All Games
               - Favorites
               - Installed (Windows/MS-DOS only)
               - Genres
                       - Sub Genre

I've manually assigned Series, Franchise, Genre/Sub-genre to every game in my collection to be pretty specific in how my metadata is presented. I really enjoy how granular the LB system lets you get if you decide to go off the rails like I do. For those interested you can see view the data yourselves (and apply it to your collection with one of JoeVikings plugins) here

[hamsnibit]

I like using the favorites function to pick games that I absolutely want to try to play, and that way if I like it, it stays, and if not, I remove it.

[BrofessorPhD]

I just want to game so I usually stick to my favorites list of 20ish games.  To find something new I use automatic playlists and/or game discovery center.

[MrDeKat]

I like to use playlists, especially the automatic playlists. I have 270 for game collections (I called "series" because it sounds more natural to me), although I have to revise them when adding new systems.

Also I have a collection for the games played in each year, and my last "project" is a playlist for each arcade board, although its progres is very slowly 😅

 

Edited August 30 by MrDeKat