There are so many incorrect game titles. After 5 years of researching the matter, these are the common source authorities I and others use to obtain the proper spelling and formatting of game titles. They are listed in order of decreasing reliability:
1. Publisher (your best source but time consuming or impossible sometimes)
Game's Instruction Manual (sometimes listed INSIDE)
2.
http://gamefaqs.com (I contribute to them also)
https://en.wikipedia.org (info on just about every game created)
http://metacritic.com/game http://ign.com (decades of data)
3. game's artwork (illustrators sometimes get carried away which causes errors, confusion and ambiguity)
4.
http://amazon.com (careless naming but good source of release dates)
I know many of you use these sites because I find their distinct errors showing up in some game data fields. So far I’ve edited thousands of games, strategy guides and other items. When I’m not positively sure about something, I may check up to a half dozen sources before I enter and/or correct data. If I can't confirm, I leave it alone. I also back test data such as UPC barcodes and ISBN’s. Rarely, but sometimes, you’ll even discover an incorrect one printed on the artwork.
This is off topic, but here’s a tip about ISBN’s which are primarily used for books (e.g., strategy guides). Our Style Guide requires that they be entered with dashes. This is very difficult to do correctly because publishers have unique formats. Here’s the truly simple and quick solution:
http://isbn.org/ISBN_converter. It coverts an IBSN-10 to ISBN-13 and visa versa into its proper format with dashes. Also, you can enter the number to be converted with or without dashes. It flags bad numbers too! ISBN’s are a powerful way to locate a book anywhere in the world.
While I’ve gone astray while writing this, I want to emphasize that UPC numbers are 12-digits long (USA, Canada, et al) and ISBN’s are either 10 or 13-digits. So many users have confused the two and put them into the wrong data field. By the way, ISBN-13 is just the newer format and both return the same result in a search.
One last pet peeve, and I hope an administrator reads this. So many users don’t know the difference between a game’s publisher and its developer. To add to all this confusion, sometimes there's a third party involved, called a distributor. I've seen some prominent sites mistakenly think the distributor is the publisher. Please, write a post to explain the difference or revive an old one if previously done.
That’s enough of my rambling. Kindest regards to all.
