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[Urist McLongbeard]

Hello, everybody.

I'd like to present a project of mine. If you have a game you really like and would like to find other games that are similar to it, you can now easily do this.

The interface probably isn't very intuitive yet since it is the first human-usable release, what you have to do is basically search a game by title and hopefully see the similar games by genre and gameplay. Try some popular ones, otherwise you probably won't get any results.

Examples:
http://game-graph.appspot.com/?id=11291 - Quake
http://game-graph.appspot.com/?id=12447 - The Settlers

Location without queries: http://game-graph.appspot.com/

So, give it a try, tell me what you think.

[mr. macduggan]

I put in Team Fortress 2, and it gave me a long list of other games with "team" and "fortress" in it, mostly RTSs, and I even got Shrek 2, just by the virtue of it being a sequel. If you could add a genre filter, that would be cool. (by the way, it did put the original team fortress at the top of the list, so it's not all bad!)
Keep up work on this, and it could be really helpful, but string-based search doesn't necessarily mean a game is similar.

[Urist McLongbeard]

I put in Team Fortress 2, and it gave me a long list of other games with "team" and "fortress" in it, mostly RTSs, and I even got Shrek 2, just by the virtue of it being a sequel. If you could add a genre filter, that would be cool. (by the way, it did put the original team fortress at the top of the list, so it's not all bad!)
Keep up work on this, and it could be really helpful, but string-based search doesn't necessarily mean a game is similar.

Team Fortress 2 isn't in the database (for some reason). I guess you should search for Orange Box (as TF2 is a part of it).

Keep up work on this, and it could be really helpful, but string-based search doesn't necessarily mean a game is similar.

It is isn't string based. You're supposed to click one of the items in the list (duh! I've told you the interface isn't intuitive).

Here are your Orange Box search results: http://game-graph.appspot.com/?id=10187

Upd.: edited the link.

[anexiledone]

No DF!? lol

This is a pretty nifty database. Looks like it's going to give me a few new games to try out

[Urist McLongbeard]

No DF!? lol

Dwarf Fortress is in the database, but it doesn't have anything similar to it (because it is pretty unique and not very popular too).

[Detrevni|inverteD]

This is a really good idea!

The amount of times I've googled "games similar to ______", only to turn up with next to no useful results. This will help a lot of people, myself included.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

It seems to have a real problem with sequels.
Tried S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky and all the Stalker games were related to Far Cry and not each other!
Also tried Half-life 2 and unless I'm reading it wrong it states Left 4 Dead is linked closer to HL2 than Half-Life 2: Ep. 2

So how does this work anyway, is it all submitted or does it search for related games? If it is the former it could benefit a lot by having it open to the community so they can edit which games are the closest to each other.

One last thing, why can I move the boxes around? Is there a point to that or is it just left over script?

[mr. macduggan]

No DF!? lol

Dwarf Fortress is in the database, but it doesn't have anything similar to it (because it is pretty unique and not very popular too).

I actually got it with my TF2 submission, because it's slaves to armok 2, and the 2 matched.

[Draco18s]

Looks interesting.

Huh.  Things that are related to the thing I searched don't always get lines connecting them.  For instance, What Did I do to Deserve This, My Lord and What Did I do to Deserve This, My Lord 2 are related, and both show up in a search for Dungeon Keeper, but aren't linked to each other in said search for Dungeon Keeper.

Whereas a search for Portal 2 returns a link to both The Orange Box and Narbacular Drop, and The Orange Box and Narbacular Drop are linked (interestingly, Brink is related to The Orange Box, but not Portal 2, and is show in the graph for Portal 2, but is the only example of such an occurrence that I can find--edit, ah, no, found some for 3D chess that do this too).

Also, hilarious, few of the chess titles are connected to each other, despite all being chess.  Similarly, Fritz 5 is connected to Fritz 8 and 9, but not 6, 7, 10, 11, or 12 (1-4 being not present).

[Biag]

There seem to be a lot of "stub" games. Victoria II, for example, is not connected to anything, despite fitting very well in the Paradox grand strategy web. Also, Amnesia: The Dark Descent should at least be connected to the Penumbra games.

For an early WIP, though, this thing is awesome. Thanks for working on it!

[quinnr]

Very interesting, and I like the click-and-draggable charts. I'll definitely be watching this.

[Flying Carcass]

Very neat tool; I like what you're trying to do with this!

However, I'm surprised that there are very few games similar to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, according to the search results...

[dehimos]

When I have a search, the url dont show the numbers, only # ¿How do I get him?

[Urist McLongbeard]

It seems to have a real problem with sequels.
Tried S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Clear Sky and all the Stalker games were related to Far Cry and not each other!
Also tried Half-life 2 and unless I'm reading it wrong it states Left 4 Dead is linked closer to HL2 than Half-Life 2: Ep. 2

Yep, some of the links might be missing. I think it will be relatively easy to detect sequels in the database and build the missing links.

So how does this work anyway, is it all submitted or does it search for related games? If it is the former it could benefit a lot by having it open to the community so they can edit which games are the closest to each other.

I wrote a crawler to "borrow" (wink-wink ) data from one of the game review/critics sites. Every game there is usually linked to other games. The problem was that the links were one way only (say, there is a link from Doom 2 to Doom, but there is not link from Doom to Doom 2), which was really inconvinient - that's how I got the idea to make a proper database.

Enabling the community to edit the content is a great idea but I'm not sure how to do it (yet). The quality of submitted information is the primary cocern: the current database may be missing some links between games but the ones that are there are relevant and helpful. With the community editing it there might be lots of irrelevant rubbish links.

One last thing, why can I move the boxes around? Is there a point to that or is it just left over script?

The point to that is that the boxes sometimes overlap and dragging allows you to move one of the boxes out of the way to read another box. It was easier than writing overlap-detection algorithm and it also looks cool I might rework it later, though.

Huh.  Things that are related to the thing I searched don't always get lines connecting them.  For instance, What Did I do to Deserve This, My Lord and What Did I do to Deserve This, My Lord 2 are related, and both show up in a search for Dungeon Keeper, but aren't linked to each other in said search for Dungeon Keeper.

Whereas a search for Portal 2 returns a link to both The Orange Box and Narbacular Drop, and The Orange Box and Narbacular Drop are linked (interestingly, Brink is related to The Orange Box, but not Portal 2, and is show in the graph for Portal 2, but is the only example of such an occurrence that I can find--edit, ah, no, found some for 3D chess that do this too).

Also, hilarious, few of the chess titles are connected to each other, despite all being chess.  Similarly, Fritz 5 is connected to Fritz 8 and 9, but not 6, 7, 10, 11, or 12 (1-4 being not present).

Yep, as I've said, some links are missing. However, the existing links should help you find something anyway. The problem with chess seems to be that chess isn't so popular among gamers, so noone probably bothered to add links for chess. Detecting sequels (see above) supposedly will help to find missing links between all the sequel parts.

When I have a search, the url dont show the numbers, only # ¿How do I get him?

Right now there is now way to get permalink to search results page without using Firebug. I will add a link for every page today.

[debvon]

Wow, I've been looking for something like this for ages. I can't wait to use it when it's more refined.