Sunday, October 1, 2023

Automated Video Game Recommendations...Again!

For no apparent reason, Metacritic has updated their website, which of course broke the web scraper I had written to parse it. The new version of the scraper is ready and available here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16UDoMxS-bz6vGYrGzzoH5bSeZ1Lr6lP9/view?usp=sharing 

Sunday, July 23, 2023

Saturday, March 11, 2023

Automated Video Game Recommendations!

Once again, I have solved a problem that possibly only I have. Metacritic is a pretty neat website, but do you know what would be even neater? If you guessed "being able to use its data without having to actually look at the site," well, strange minds think alike. I wrote a program that downloads Metacritic's "Best Games of All Time" lists for various platforms (currently just the top 100 games), applies a blacklist of games I've already played or aren't interested in, and displays the top game for each platform, along with its aggregate critic score. (A future update may do something with user scores.) It will also show the string Metacritic uses to uniquely identify the game, in case you wish to add it to the blacklist. Switching the displayed platforms should be very easy, as you just need to modify the list at the top of the code.

The program is available to download here. The code is written in Python and relies on the requests and bs4 libraries, so you will need to have those installed. The archive also includes a sample blacklist and a Windows batch script for easy running.

Sunday, January 30, 2022

Privacy Policy

 If you're reading this, you likely clicked on a link on one of my Android apps for some reason. I am required to tell you that the app collects the following personal information:

  • None
None of your information is collected by the app in any way. I know nothing about you, and I'd like to keep it that way. Please don't send me any personal info.

Sunday, October 24, 2021

Metroid 5: I waited 19 years for this one

 I successfully avoided almost all spoilers before playing Metroid Dread, so I will offer you the same courtesy before reading this post: Spoilers abound.

This is what I was able to get with no hints or walkthroughs. Respectable enough, I think.