Hey,
I've always been looking for a good way to keep track of future games I'm interested in. In the past I've tried things like the (now discontinued) Decide-o-tron app from Penny Arcade, and I've heard people mention backloggery.com, and while both of those are a good resource for already released games, their information about future releases is not very up-to-date, so often times I'd hear about a game and try to add it to a "games to watch" kind of wish list, but often there wasn't an entry for it yet, so I couldn't add it, and would eventually forget about it.
So instead, I resorted to having a text list of games I was interested in. And trying to keep track of when those games were releasing, and which platforms they were releasing on, was a very manual process.
I realized recently that Giant Bomb has a really useful API for it's pretty comprehensive database of games, which is pretty up to date with new releases, and includes release dates and target platforms that get updated on a fairly regular basis (or that I can update myself if need be).
So I started playing around with the site more, and I discovered the lists feature was a really handy way to keep a wish list that was tied to the database entry for the specific games I was interested in. The only thing I wanted in addition was a way to display the release date / target platforms, and sort by upcoming releases.
So I went ahead and made a little web page using the API to parse a list created on the site, and query those extra details about release date and platforms that I wanted.
Games to Watch
It has a few limitations:
- Since the API doesn't have a way to query a user's lists, I have to grab the raw HTML. The API has JSONp queries to work around the same-origin policy, but since the raw HTML can't be retrieved that way, I had to use anyorigin.com to proxy it. This makes it pretty slow, and it can fail if anyorigin isn't working at the time. Anyorigin will probably block it at some point as well.
- You need to enter your GiantBomb API key. I'm not storing this anywhere except in a local cookie on your machine (you can view source and read the JavaScript to confirm).
In the future it'd be nice if the API could also query lists (and maybe even edit them), but until then because of the same-origin issue, my ability to make this kind of application is limited. If GB wanted to make this feature themselves, as sort of a customization of how to display the games on your lists, they could. Having some way to choose additional fields to show custom information about the games on your list would be really flexible and useful, I think.
Anyway, if this is a thing you happened to be looking for, enjoy for now at least!
Thanks,
Joe
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