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.