malvasia bianca

And now you can see the video games I’ve played recently.

There’s still a little bit of refactoring to do on the code that I’ve checked in, and a little bit more code to write. But the previous constructs held up reasonably well; easy enough to add the new item types (video games, game consoles, game developers) through a mix of cutting and pasting, reusing existing classes, and one class extraction. A shade more cutting and pasting than I’d like, but I’ll deal with that soon enough. Or at least try; I suspect that I’ll run into more places where C++ templates would be more useful than Java generics.

One interesting non-parallel between books and games is the way I plan to handle series. (I haven’t yet added series of games yet; next weekend.) Some book series are quite straightforward: the books are named Series, volume N. In others, the book names aren’t so predictable, but at least there’s a straightforward order and notion of volume number.

You’d think it might be the same way with video games – surely Resident Evil 4 counts as the fourth item in its series? Well, no: the games in the series so far are Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, Resident Evil 3, Resident Evil: Code Veronica, Resident Evil 0, and Resident Evil 4. Plus some spinoffs and ports, some of which (the GameCube and forthcoming DS versions of the original) are remakes with more significant changes. So there’s no useful notion of “volume number” in a video game series; you might as well just sort them by release date. Also, different games in a series can be published on different consoles and even made by different developers, so there’s no attributes of a game that you can glean from its presence in a series.

For that matter, even the definition of a series isn’t well-defined – if you take the original Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Sunshine, Paper Mario, and Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga, how many different series are they part of? I can imagine any number from 1 to 4 as an answer. So while I think I will add the notion of a video game series, there won’t be the same structure as in the book case, where I had classes BookLike, Book, Volume, and Series in a sort of V-shaped inheritance diagram.

There are a few features I’d still like to add, most notably links to blog posts, but they’re all relatively straightforward. I should really spend more time learning about SQL and Ruby, so I can play around with changing the underlying implementation.