I'm doing some testing on the /releases data to come up with a reliable way to order release dates to generate calendar data. It seems like using &sort=release_date:desc works fairly well (if you go in the other direction you end up with some REALLY old games).
There seem to be a couple of interesting data anomalies. There are a couple of games that have either broken data or there is some really impressive future planning going on. These are both Yu-Gi-Oh games planned for apparently 2204 and 2201.
There is some other oddness in here in the sorting behavior where, once you get down to more reliable dates, like dates with a day, month, and year the sorting becomes consistent, but before then many games set to release in 2015 are mixed in with other games set to release in december of next year. This seems to be a pessimistic view on when those games will come out, whereas the sorting puts games coming out in Q1 of 2015 mix in with games coming out in january of 2015, so an optimistic view, as q1 game releases end up ahead of february / march releases for next year.
I haven't seen a way to do it, but optimally I would want to look through only a data set that has year / month / date all non-null and starting from the current time, which would be a lot easier if the value was represented by something like a Millisecond type long time. Adding the ability to query based on time ranges or can you do that with the filter fields? I would want to do something like release_date>X and release_date<Y.
Regardless of the issues / questions let me just say that I REALLY appreciate the data availability and I wish more websites would provide such great data to developers.
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