Handy Websites for Video Gamers?

[Retro STrife]

Got any useful gaming websites that you like to use? I like websites that serve a unique purpose, meeting some niche need in my gaming life. There's ones we all know - like gamefaqs.com - but here's a few others I like and figured I'd share, just in case other gamers hadn't discovered them yet:

1. [url]HowLongToBeat.com[/url] -- HowLongToBeat is the site that inspired this topic. I just stumbled across it yesterday when I wanted to see how long it would take to beat Xenogears. Like most adult gamers, long games are a burden on my life and nowadays I want to know what length to expect before I start. Based on polling gamers, this site gives estimates of how long it takes to beat a game. And it tells you an estimate for (1) just the main story, and (2) for completionists. Apparently over 18,000 games are on the site. Before finding this site, I had to do google searches of reviews, in the hopes of finding a reviewer who mentioned the completion time in his review. Of course, most reviewers are pressed for time and only play the main story, so their estimates were only of minimal help for a completionist like me. This site changes that. And so far, I find the time estimates to be very accurate on there.

2. [url]Videogames.Pricecharting.com[/url] -- Video Game Price Charting is a great site for collectors. By tracking selling prices over the past several years (mostly based on eBay "sold" prices, I think), this website creates graphs of the pricing trends for almost any game or console imaginable. It's almost like looking at stock market charts. For example, search Panzer Dragoon Saga and you'll learn that in November 2007 the average selling price for the game was $150, and in August 2015 the average selling price was $402. How about a less desirable game like, say, Buck Bumble for N64? It averaged $3.99 in January 2007, and now it's peaking at $9.80. Not bad. As you can see, this site is great for learning pricing trends. (COLLECTING LIFE SPOILER: Try as I might, I can't find any game prices that are trending on the decrease over the past several years.... Sorry buyers.)

3. [url]TrueAchievements.com[/url] -- One day a few years ago, I was playing Xbox 360 when I thought: Gamerscore is nice, but when I earn an achievement I wish I knew how it stacked up against other gamers. For example, if I earn a very difficult achievement, I wondered: how many other gamers were able to pull that off? So I googled the idea, and stumbled upon TrueAchievements. This site solved that issue for me. It lets you link your gamertag to the site to see how you compare to other gamers. For example, for each achievement you've earned, it'll tell you the percentage of people who own that game that were also able to earn the achievement.

4. [url]GameRankings.com[/url] -- Here's one you've probably heard of. GameRankings has been around forever. It's like Metacritic (it's an aggregate review website), but strictly for games. If you want to read reviews, nothing beats Metacritic. But for searching and researching, Metacritic fails miserably, and that's where GameRankings comes in. This site let's you do advanced searches of the best and worst reviewed games in tons of categories. Wanna know the top 10 platformers released on the Nintendo 64? Done. (SM64 and Banjo Kazooie are the top 2.) How about.... the worst sports games in 2004 released for the Playstation 2? Done. (Backyard Wrestling 2 and Strike Force Bowling.) Also, unlike Metacritic, this site does games going back to the 16-bit era. Really a great site for researching game scores.


I love these kind of nifty gaming sites. Anyone have any other good ones to add? Please share.

[Herschie]

www.operationsports.com

[Rev]

racketboy.com - great site (even if they stole some things from the VGC) but finding games that you may not have heard about before, finding the more rare games for the console, and finding genre specific games.

http://retro-sanctuary.com/Top%20Games%20Main.html - great site for finding an opinionated view on top games for a variety of consoles.

http://questicle.net/ - find reviews for all NES games ever released in the US.

[Sonicx9]

HG101: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net

[scotland]

Two obvious ones I guess

AtariAge - Amazing retro forum, but its overwhelming. The thread on the Coleco Chameleon is like 350 pages. The technical expertise that is there is impressive, but also intimidating. How do you navigate that place without it being a hobby in itself is beyond me. Its needs curators.

Gamefaqs - Old skool text walkthroughs can be nice to have.

Specific systems have sites, like Denial at sleepingelephant.com for the VIC20, lemon64.com for the C64, 99er.net for the TI99, etc