The official legal mumbo-jumbo is in the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, but here is the basic idea:
- Berk & Hirt Consulting, dba MobyGames
- MobyGames reserves the right to reject any contributions if they are below a standard level of quality or inappropriate.
- Once information is entered into the MobyGames database, it becomes the property of MobyGames.
- MobyGames is a trademark of Berk & Hirt Consulting.
- All content, code, and text is Copyright 1999-2006, MobyGames.
- MobyGames will not share your personal information in any way without your approval.
That's a damn good question, and one that I'm happy to answer:
- While other game review sites have verbose reviews written by
professional critics, they tend to have only the most current reviews
online. MobyGames is not strictly limited to new games; our database goes
back 20 years.
- Finding a review on other gaming sites is
usually a chore--you usually have to know the exact name of the game,
or you can't separate "motorcycle racing" from all
racing games in the search results, or something else equally frustrating.
- Games are rated by multiple people and reviewed by real gamers, for results that aren't biased and artificially
inflated. A rating or review in MobyGames actually means something.
MobyGames is much, much more than a review site, as explained earlier in
this document. If reviews are the only thing you're looking for, we encourage you
to use MobyGames in conjunction with other web sites in your searches.
Why would we? MobyGames doesn't do anything illegal. In fact, we're covered by Fair Use:
PER TITLE 17 - UNITED STATES CODE - SECTION 107
"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use
of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies
or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for
purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including
multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an
infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work
in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall
include - 1 the purpose and character of the use, including whether such
use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2 the nature of the copyrighted work; 3 the amount and substantiality
of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4 the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the
copyrighted work. The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself
bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of
all the above factors."
The specific phrase above to pay attention to is "for purposes such as criticism, comment,...or
research, is not an infringement of copyright." Since MobyGames is used for those purposes,
MobyGames is not violating copyright.
Personal Use: You may reprint MobyGames textual information for your casual, non-commercial, personal use as long as you properly credit us in anything you publish, by name (MobyGames) or site name (www.mobygames.com) and provide a direct link. Any site that displays advertising, affiliate links, engages in any commercial activity including but not limited to buying, selling, renting games or other merchandise including Ebay links or listings or links or listings on other auction sites do not qualify as non-commercial. More extensive use of the data beyond "casual use" requires prior written permission from a representative of MobyGames.
MobyGames is a huge database of video game information. Just check out our current stats if you don't believe me. However, as large and comprehensive as the database is we are still missing some games. If you own or know of a game that is missing from the database go ahead and contribute it.
Professional Use: MobyGames offers a commercial license. If you have specific business needs that MobyGames can solve, please contact us and a business representative will get back to you.
Jim: I'm an oddball; I like any game that has one or more outstanding elements, like competent programming, great
graphics, or excellent music. I try to maintain a list of my favorite games on my Bio, so check there if you'd like to know.
Brian:
- Prince of Persia for it's great game-play and graphics.
- Heart of Darkness; a great modern platform game
- More recently, ICO; One of the only 3D adventure/puzzle games I've ever enjoyed
- SimCity & SimCity 3000
- Duke Nukem 3D
- Civ2
Dave:
- Half-Life and all it's mods for twitch.
- Civ2 as the best empire builder around.
- V for Victory as a turn based, hex board, historical WWII game. Market Garden is the best game in the series.
- Close Combat as a real time, squad based, historical WWII game.
- Parappa The Rapper for just being plain fun.
- All the Resident Evil games.
- Battlefield 1942 for online multiplayer.
- All of the Grand Theft Auto games both 2D sprites and 3D for driving
- Tony Hawk for sports.
That depends on the kind of program you're trying to capture screenshots
from and what kind of video card is installed in your machine. Here's a
listing of just about every possible PC program and graphics mode, as well as "uncapturable" screens like console systems:
| Trying to capture: |
Use this program: |
Here's why: |
| Text-mode screens or tweaked "high-res" screens (80x100x16 and 160x100x16) |
Our free "classic" text-mode capture utility |
Creates authentic "classic" text-mode captures. We wrote it just for you, and it's , so download it today! :-) Great for Infocom games; also captures "high-res" tweaked CGA modes like 80x100x16 and 160x100x16. Works on any PC ever made. (Note: If this utility can't seem to capture text screens in your program, use Screen Thief mentioned below with /OUTPUT:SCR to create the proper raw screen data to feed to this utility.) |
Bootable Games
|
Flopper
|
Flopper has a screen dump and GIF conversion program that works very well for bootable games that use CGA. Alternately, you can try to use a PC emulator that may allow screenshots to be taken.
|
CGA, EGA, VGA, Tweaked VGA, or SVGA graphics modes
|
Screen Thief.
|
Screen Thief captures any CGA/EGA/VGA screen, including tweaked VGA modes, and also SuperVGA screens if you have a supported chipset. Majorly kick-ass, especially since the author has released it for free.
|
VGA, Tweaked VGA, or VESA graphics modes
|
Video Thief
|
Extremely powerful! Can capture from protected-mode programs, VESA BIOS 1.2 and 2.0 (even LFB!) graphics modes, and even allows you to reprogram the PIC so that you can capture from games that completely take over the keyboard.
|
Windows games (including Direct3D)
|
HyperSnap
|
Works very well and is pretty much the only program out there that works as advertised. (Note: Please don't use the unregistered version of HyperSnap to capture shots for MobyGames because it creates a watermark/bug that will get the screenshot rejected.)
|
Any old PC graphics mode that isn't coming off of a VGA card (ie. CGA on a native PC/XT)
|
CAMERA
|
An excellent general screen capture utility for just about all video modes running on their native hardware, like CGA, EGA, Hercules, and even the hard-to-capture Tandy 1000/PCjr 320x200x16 mode. (If trying to capture Tandy/PCjr mode, be sure to specify the format on the command-line as it isn't auto-detected.)
|
Any console system
|
Any video capture board
|
Capture your screenshot using any low-cost capture board you may have (including the sub-$50 WinTV series of cards, or the built-in capture abilities of most ATI video cards) and save it as a JPEG. Works like a charm. In fact, it's pretty easy to do. Here's some handy capture tips for anyone willing to give this a try: |
- Don't go overboard on a capture card: Any cheap card (or videocard with built-in capture) that can capture 640x480 at as little as 10 frames per second (30 is best) to a hard drive is more than acceptable for capturing still shots.
- Capture an entire session, then go through it later for the frame(s) you want. Don't try to capture individual frames while you're playing -- this seriously affects gameplay ;-)
- If there's a lot of motion in the scene and you see "tearing" or "comb" effects due to the interlacing, use a paint program like Adobe Photoshop or JASC Paint Shop Pro to deinterlace the frame. (Pick either one field or the other, but don't blend them both together or you might end up with a blurry mess)
- If you have a choice between an RF TV adapter and (RCA jack) composite hookups between your capture card and your video source, choose the composite. If you have a choice between Composite and S-Video, totally go with the S-Video connection as it nearly eliminates color bleeding.
- If an emulator exists for the console platform that works very well (ie Bleem for the Playstation), it is acceptable -- and easier -- to use that instead of trying to capture them yourself.
For an example of (what I'm pretty sure is) emulator screenshots, check out
Soul Blade. For live captured shots from a real Dreamcast, see the aforementioned
Soul Calibur entry.
Capture Guidelines: MobyGames only accepts GIF, PNG and JPEG formats. If the program you want to capture uses a high-color (64000 colors) or true-color (16.7 million colors) video mode, you should capture and convert it to a JPEG file. Otherwise, all 256-color and lower screen captures should be stored as a GIF or PNG file (undithered if you understand where to enable it in your graphics processing program).
Since Screen Thief, Video Thief, and CAMERA.COM don't save in GIF, PNG or JPEG formats, you must use an intermediate conversion utility,
such as Image Alchemy,
Paint Shop Pro or Graphics
Workshop, to convert your screen captures to GIF, PNG or JPEG. (Image
Alchemy and Graphics Workshop are available in DOS versions for those
who can't run Windows.) Another kick-ass swiss-army-knife is DISPLAY. Get past
the interface, and you'll find the most powerful graphics manipulation utility for DOS ever.
Please note that the above "rules" don't exist to make your life
harder--we're just trying to help you take great screenshots that you'll
be proud of.
Before we answer, we'll re-state our main goal: MobyGames is much more concerned with quality rather than quantity. That being said, there are some situations where submissions are rejected (and keep in mind that most of these guidelines are listed on the page you contribute with):
Screenshots may be rejected for one of the following reasons:
- We generally don't accept more than 30 screenshots per game. Some games may require more some less. Roughly 30 screenshots is the general rule. This also goes for duplicate screenshots. In both cases, please look at the screenshots before you submit.
- All screenshots must have a meaningful description, not just "ingame 1", "ingame 2", etc. If it's not painfully obvious what we're looking at, it needs a decent description. Blank descriptions are not accepted.
- Screenshots can give away the ending of the game. These are "spoilers", because they spoil the game for people who haven't played it yet, and we don't accept them.
Box covers may be rejected for one of the following reasons:
- Duplicate box covers are unnecessary. We don't need 3 copies of the exact same box cover.
- All covers should be about 200 - 300 DPI to be accepted (this is about 600 pixels wide for the average box cover). Anything smaller has too little detail to be useful.
Please review Cover Scanning Tips for more information.
If you disagree with these policies, email us at 
. to offer your suggestions.
Windows: While special and/or extended ASCII characters can be added by copying a single character out of the Keyboard Map program (in Accessories), a faster way is to hold down ALT and type the 4-digit extended ASCII code number on the numeric keypad. For example, es zet is ASCII code 223. So to enter it, you'd type ALT+0223, which should look like this: ß
A complete listing of the ASCII character set can be found here: http://www.terena.nl/library/multiling/euroml/tests/html-eurolat1.html or http://www.bbsinc.com/iso8859.html
Quizzley7 is a long-time supporter of MobyGames and a whiz at entering credits like these. Here's some tips from him:
First, a lot of games don't list the credits in the manual. Some games list
incomplete credits. Sega is especially bad about this; they tend to only
print the localization credits in the manual. Therefore, I always try to
list the credits displayed in the game itself. This may seem difficult,
because the credits tend to fly by much faster than most people can type.
The trick is to take screenshots of the credits. I find it easier to enter
the credits into Moby using screenshots, because I can arrange the
screenshot window right next to the window in which I'm entering the
credits. With consoles, you usually need a video capture card to take
screenshots. However, if you don't have a video capture card, recording the
credits with a VCR works pretty well too.
Emulators make it easy to grab the credits, because they make it easier to
play all the way through the game. In particular, the save-state function
makes any game much easier by allowing for uninterupted progress. If you
have a ROM file, you can often just look in the file to find the game's
credits. I use the command "strings (filename) | more" on my linux box to
easily page through the ROM to find the credits. (This also works for any game whose platform utilizes 7-bit ASCII, like PC games, Atari ST games, and more. --Editor) Not all games store their credits in a way that can be read directly though, so you may still have to play through the game.
Japanese games tend list aliases or abbreviations for the developers
responsible for the game. The only way I've found to find the complete
names for these folks is to try and find other games that they have worked
on where they are credited properly. Even then, it's not a sure thing that
they are the same people. On the other hand, usually you can match names
up if the person performs the same role and worked for the same company in
the same time frame.
Hopefully this information will encourage more people to help us out with
entering credits!
Our "main" list of genres -- also referred to as main categories -- are the most basic building blocks of game taxonomy. Meaning, they are intentionally basic and encompassing, such that any game in the world can fit into at least one of the main categories.
A lot of people have asked us why some genres are not included in this list. That is because, for a game category to be included in the main list, it must stand by itself. For example, since there is no such thing as a puzzle game that isn't also a strategy game, Puzzle becomes a sub-genre instead of a main one.
Here's an example clarifying how important the main categories are: Think about the materials we see around us. What's the common classification expression -- Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral, right? That's a pretty good example: I am animal, the taco I just ate was vegetable, and the toilet I will no doubt be visiting shortly is mineral. Asking for the puzzle genre to join the main list is like asking for "rocks" to join the Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral list when it's clearly already a mineral. It doesn't matter if the rock is in the shape of, say, an animal; that doesn't change the fact that it is a rock.
Hopefully by now you can see the importance we place on our main categories for the purposes of proper game classification. They may not match your specific definition of a game type, but that is sort-of the point. In order to properly classify games such as a scientist would classify a new element, we have to "break the mold" and classify them how they are supposed to be classified, not how they already have been for years.
Congratulate yourself if you've read the entire FAQ up to this point!
You must be really interested in MobyGames--thanks!
