Heroic games launcher is getting / has Amazon Prime gaming support on the latest git version. Really nice to get all the Neo Geo stuff that prime is giving away up and running. Heroic is really shaping up into becoming a great way to install non-steam games on Linux / Steamdeck.
It's also better than the Windows clients for EGS, GOG and Amazon, plus it automatically adds the games to Steam as non-Steam games and pulls artwork down from SteamGridDB (though I sometimes have to go into SGDB and Boop different artwork because some daft vaseline cover has become the most popular for some games).
Unless one of the client operators starts clamping down on that and blocking the app (or, even worse, banning users who use it - though that would be monumentally dumb considering they're paying customers) there's really no need to use the official clients for Epic, GOG and now Amazon.
In other news...
So I started messing about with a version of
Baserow installed on my home server just to see how I get on with tinkering with an Airtable-like application, and decided I'd catalogue my games on there and move my backlog over.
It took a bit of learning (I'm a complete database novice), but I've got a really functional setup now. I still need to tweak a few of the number values, but I can do that without having to re-enter my entire game library, which I've laboriously added to the database.
I setup a series of criteria and then scored values within that criteria. The highest score for each criteria then goes into a "master number" that partially determines backlog ranking.
So the criteria I scored are:
- Gameplay genre
- Story genre
- Visual aesthetic
- Personal tilt
For the first three, the the highest ranking attribute contributes to a game's total score. The fourth one is just a preference number I put in.
Right now all the numbers are 1-100, but I'm thinking of lowering it to 1-20 to make the gaps between the numbers smaller, which will allow me to create a view of the data with certain biases (such as sorting in favour of my gameplay preference, or visual aesthetic preference, and so on). I also added optional gating for the games so they'd have categories that can be the main sorting before the numerical scores. These gates are Must Play, High Priority, Medium Priority and Low Priority.
I won't go into how I did the calculations too much because I've spent enough time on it and it's probably very crude, but it actually works and depending on what bias I select in terms of displaying Backlog data, I get different games.
Here's my backlog top 5 for games that I've ticked I want to play (or replay) with no biases:
1. Persona 5 Royal
2. Cyberpunk 2077
3. Street Fighter 6
4. Persona 4 Golden
5. Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade
If you don't know my tastes well, looking at that list means I've trained the numbers very well, and games that are closest to my tastes have risen to the top of my backlog.
But I can setup other biases. If I bias by my categories, here's how my top 5 looks.
1. Street Fighter 6
2. Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade
3. Metal Gear Solid
4. Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth
5. Shenmue II
All these games are in my "Must Play" list and the backlog has sorted them by my calculated preferences after categorising them.
But I can do other biases too. For example, if I'm more interested in a story game, my backlog looks like this:
1. Cyber Manhunt
2. malViolence
3. Digital Exorcist
4. Deus Ex
5. Metal Gear Solid
But if I want to play older games, here's how it pans out:
1. Sonic the Hedgehog
2. Sonic the Hedgehog 2
3. Sonic CD
4. Shenmue II
5. Deus Ex
There are some similarities between some of the lists, and that's probably because all my scoring is on a 1-100 scale, which means some games may just pull ahead on score regardless of bias. I think dropping my scale down to 20 or 10 may make things easier to shake up.
Plus I'm only using these lists as an indicator - I'm not gonna abstract my entire decision-making on what game I play next to a few numbers on a database table. But if my tastes change or I'm in the mood for something different, I can adjust the values for gameplay or story genres and get a whole different ordering. Might throw something in my face that I wasn't thinking about, but may just be the right game for the moment.
It's certainly an improvement on my old backlog, which was essentially a list in my Apple Reminders app that always got unwieldy after a few months.
www.videogameschronicle.com
www.gog.com
metacouncil.com
