Inspiration

This project a self-hosted video game review aggregator—a one-stop destination for gamers to get comprehensive insights and reviews for their favorite titles. By pulling data from reputable sources like Steam, MetaCritic, and OpenCritic, this platform aims to streamline the gaming experience, offering users a holistic view of a game's reception from both critics and players alike.

Using web-scraping techniques, the platform will gather reviews, ratings, and other relevant information for a given game across multiple sites and save it to a MySQL database. Users can then search for a game and view its overall rating, along with links to individual reviews and ratings from different sources. This program tracks the distribution of scores across different platforms and adjusts them to average out biases in scoring systems. This information will provide a more comprehensive and accurate depiction of a game's reception, allowing users to decide which games to play.

Challenges we ran into

By primarily using scrapers for this prototype, I ran into a lot of issues getting banned from different review sites. SteamDB banned my scraping client from accessing the site and GlitchWave banned my IP address, preventing any device on my network from accessing their site.

Steam was also tricky because of the age verification which prevented non-logged-in users from accessing restricted content. After deciphering the API using Chrome's developer console, I was able to bypass this check by including special cookies that told Steam I was over 18.

What's next for Video Game Review Aggregator

I want to add support for more sites including using official APIs so that I can amass even more data! The front end could be improved for better usability and more tools can be added for more data visualization.