What do I do? I'm confused Simply choose which of the two games you prefer. If you've seen the exact same pairing before, or if you don't recognise one or other of the games, just hit the relevant button and it'll give you a new pairing. Keep choosing or skipping pairs until you get bored. Note that it's perfectly valid to vote for a game twice, just so long as it's not paired against the same game. So voting for, say Daytona against Chuckie Egg and Gauntlet separately is perfectly valid. Goals amigameorlame seeks to find the best game in the world. The personal theory behind it is that people aren't very good at picking one single good thing from a potentially very large set of good things, so when asked 'What's your favourite game ever?', most people are immediately overwhelmed by the potential choice. Either that or non-plussed by the banality of the question. Things become much easier, however, when you're presented with a simple, binary, either/or choice. Therefore what amigameorlame seeks to do is ask as large a number of people as possible a series of either/or game choices until they become bored or run out of games they know, and then build up a questionable database of results and perform some stats analysis on it. The most simple form of analysis is a simple ordering by number of positive votes, with a subordering of negative votes, but this assumes a very even distribution of votes and doesn't apply weighting or take into account which games won or lost against which other games. I like this simple analysis best, though, because the whole question is entirely subjective, and it's a very broad brush and subjective result. Plus it lets you give a nice simple answer; 'Game N is best'. Well, 'best' isn't perhaps the right word, and there'd be some argument over what is the right word, but in a sense I think that's not really the point. The point is, I'm calling it 'best', and I wrote the code :) I may or may not choose to perform other forms of analysis periodically on the data to take account for skews in the vote distribution, or generally to balance things one way or the other according to my whims. How do I decide what to vote for? You're pairing together games from different genres and eras It's up to you, it's entirely subjective. If you want to compare them in terms of how much fun you had playing them when they first came out, or how much fun you have playing them today, side by side, or how much you've played them, or how much they smell of fish, do so. One thing I would ask; please do keep in mind it's the 'best game in the world' survey, so trying to keep the criteria close to that is a good thing. But I want to add game N, how do I add game N? Oh please let me add game N. You suXX0R If you mail me at [email protected] with your suggestion, and any accompanying reasoning, I'll certainly consider adding game N. It's not a list of my favourite games. Heck, I won't even like or have played some of the games in the list. Neither, however, is it a complete list of all games ever. If I can't, in my own subjective way, see any redeeming features of game N then I won't bother adding it. This is why accompanying reasoning might be a good thing. Oh, and for the record, I do not suXX0R. L@m3R. :-P Why have you stuck games N and M together? Are you some sort of idiot? And why have you listed game O as being on platform P? I clearly remember playing it on my Spazznoid 2000. Right, firstly there are some games, notably games in a long series or the Capcom fighters, where I've decided not to pollute the database by having great gobs of nearly identical entries for no good reason. Yes, I know the Ultima games varied enormously, as did the Final Fantasy ones. If it helps, just imagine the one you had the most fun with when answering the question. Secondly, if a game was best on a particular platform, we tend to list that, whereas if it has good versions on several platforms, it's listed as multiplatform. Thirdly, I am not an idiot, and the Spaznoid 2000 sucked, the tape drive spat snakes at you and it came with built in COBOL. Plus only 3 people bought it. What we store We store tallies of the votes for and against games and a note of how many time a game was in a skipped pair, and we also store a log containing a list of individual matchings, who won and lost or if the game pair was skipped, the time of voting, a random key associated with users that gets stuck in a cookie and the IP of the voter. This means we have some potential for more amusing analyses if we ever feel like it. You may be asking 'Why are you storing my IP, and why are you tracking me with cookies? Curse you, that's invading my privacy'. Well, the webserver will be logging your IP with every hit. 99% of all webservers everywhere will, and unless you expressly tell your browser to block cookies (which you're more than welcome to do before playing with the site), you'll prolly have a whole bunch that are being used to track your browsing and banner clicking habits on the rest of the web. I'm storing the IP and the cookie incase I want to do some personal profiling, or profiling by domains or regions and I also want the option to go looking for people deliberately attempting to skew the results. I'm not about to go doing anything more nefarious with them, and bear in mind, I have no actual way of linking my data with you specifically, I just know of the existance of an anonymous person with certain voting profiles. Who built this site, and in what? Gribbley hacked this site into shape with bits of PHP and MySQL. He was ably abetted by Dr Wadd, with his sterling pixel pushing skills, and Tamsin and guppy, whose scripting and HTML skills exceed his own. Credit also goes to the Moodie-Sepulveda weighting algorithm and to Joost for help and advice with p1mping. Many thanks go to Dr Wadd, Tamsin, Daemon, Spadge, Fraggle, Matt, Leonie, Teaboy, nelly, MDJ, Dylan, guppy, Mark, Debz, Simon and Betty for helping with the game data entry and to uNStAble for hosting and sysadmin help.

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