Messages

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News / Re: Advanced Style Guide update and feedback thread

« on: March 25, 2025, 04:36:05 pm »

Ok.

Let me get this out then: between this, last week’s utter nonsense of Brütal Legend developped by EA, and plenty of other quirks, rules there are unlenient to the extreme. To the point you actually discourage participation and investment rather than fairly loosen those a bit when arguments (which, I must confess, I have the audacity to consider sensible) are brought to your attention.

Because to be frank, I have close to no motivation anymore to invest time and patience there when every little try to question an enforced ruleset is welcome with “nothing will change.”
And I did not even addressed yet the absolute absence of answers to the questions as to what can be done by users to save all data related to their collection, should the website suffer another crash.

At last, blaming every now and then the database schema for oh such a strict observance is just the cherry on the cake.

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News / Re: Advanced Style Guide update and feedback thread

« on: March 25, 2025, 01:54:11 pm »

A rule that applies to everything, that I suggested earlier and see none of you address, is: use the capitalization as written on the front of the item itself.

And if, for whatever reason*, this is not feasible, fallback to Chicago english rules.

What would be the issue there?
I’ll go further, why is that not the current rule? why enforcing Chicago everywhere instead of this arguably as simple and more item-faithful alternative?

* possible reasons already mentioned earlier: title not in latin alphabet, title stylized in full uppercase or in full lowercase (making it impossible to know its capitalization).

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News / Re: Advanced Style Guide update and feedback thread

« on: March 24, 2025, 04:51:09 pm »

By “why fix what isn’t broken?”, I mean why enforcing typographical rules for items that already sorted that out themselves (at least for what concerns titles with latin alphabet)?
I understand they may be exceptions, e.g. for titles stylized as full caps, having you to decide what is supposed to be capitalized when unstylized, but shouldn’t you treat them as exceptions rather than trying to nail them with rules that become a burden for unproblematic entries?

I mean, I see the french subtitle on the front cover of Baten Kaitos and I read « Les ailes éternelles et l’océan perdu »
What’s wrong with that?

the majority of members (and perhaps staff, even) will not take the time to learn or even be vaguely familiar with all of the Chicago rules for various languages.

Sorry if I dig a tad too much in the manual, you hit my uncanny kink for typography among languages putting that onto the table

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News / Re: Advanced Style Guide update and feedback thread

« on: March 24, 2025, 03:08:34 pm »

What about this item: https://vgcollect.com/item/193843 (french version of Brain age)?

Here, on the front of the box, a space is unmistakably legible before both the colon and the question mark, which are both part of the title itself, and not separator added following vgcollect’s rules.
Isn’t not putting these in direct contradiction with the rule stating we must use the actual text on the item?

A space is a character as any other else, and the typography a title sports is fully part of the title, in my humble opinion.

---

Concerning capitalization for french title, section 11.27 of the Chicago manual, as outlined by dhaabi, is dedicated to the subject:

In general, Chicago recommends sentence-style capitalization (see 8.158), the rule followed by Grevisse, Le bon usage (see 11.6, 11.25).

Follows a list of examples with an exception for the newspaper Le Monde, which has me guess that following this rule, only the first letter of each proposition is capitalized, in addition to proper names (Apollon, Bellac, Goriot and Rougon-Macquart in the list being all first, last or location names).

Hence: « Baten Kaitos: Les ailes éternelles et l’océan perdu »

Alternatively, Chicago also supports the practice such that for titles starting with a definite article, “the article and the first substantive (noun or noun form) and any intervening modifier are capitaziled (e.g., La Grande Illusion).” That does not apply to titles starting with indefinite articles.

Hence: « Baten Kaitos: Les Ailes Éternelles et l’océan perdu »

---

But yet again, why fix here what isn’t broken, as it is readily legible on the box, meaning first letter capitalization in the example of Baten Kaitos?
French version of Brain Age, in small caps, clearly follows the same rule, by the way.

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News / Re: Advanced Style Guide update and feedback thread

« on: March 22, 2025, 11:46:32 am »

Also, how should entry names be formatted regarding their capitalization when their local language has its own rules? For instance, French. I have come across several different sources which vary in explaining the rule—some say to only capitalize the first letter of a title/subtitle, others say that it's dependent on the presence of a definitive article, and even more have more convoluted explanations. For instance, this entry's name is formatted as Baten Kaitos: Les ailes éternelles et l'océan perdu.

Native French here, I feel compelled to answer. I don’t think there is a strict grammar rule here, as the game cited here examplifies you can go without capitalization in titles, but you can also go with, although usually not as much as english does: you only want to capitalize the most meaningful / important words (afaik you won’t get anything stricter than that), usually that means mostly nouns, adjectives and verbs (except maybe the auxilliary verbs être and avoir), but articles, conjuctions, etc. are usually excluded, except if the first word of the title.

Additionally, French spacing has its own rules too. I can't find any entry examples at the moment (though I have encountered them numerous times before), but I have seen many French entry names follow this format: Title : Subtitle, including the extra space preceding the colon ( : ). Here is a simple reference chart I found detailing which grammar symbols require the additional space and which don't alongside a page going through various symbols with example usage.

So, for the above two French rules, should we continue to adopt English formatting like with this entry that's formatted as Prince of Persia: Les Sables du Temps? Or adopt local rules?[/font]

This is a little more subtle than that. First the general rule regards all double typographical signs, namely « » : ; ? !. All of those must be followed by a space and preceded by a non-breakable space (except for the opening french quotation mark « where you swap the space and non-breakable space. But, this rule only applies strictly in France, and maybe in Belgium and Luxembourg for french only. As for other countries, I know that in Switzerland it is not uncommon to read french text written with german typography (and vice versa), I might be wrong but I think Quebec follows the same typography as Canadian english (which I assume is the same as US english?), and I have little idea for other french-speaking countries around the world.

So, whatever new rule that would differ from english, I have the feeling NA games with french in the title (assuming any exists) should still follow english typography (except if I am wrong and a québécois can correct me).

Note that it is usually acceptable to use spaces everywhere, given non-breakable spaces are the same length and usually hard to input anyway.

As for bilingual texts, typographical rules always loosen a bit, with the possibility to pick one language’s ruleset or the other depending of what seems best. But let’s take a few examples:

• https://vgcollect.com/item/93115: this one I would keep english rule, i.e. Prince of Persia: Les Sable du Temps; the reason being the colon follows directly a proposition in english, it makes more sense to me to not put a space there.
• https://vgcollect.com/item/118459: this one I would apply french rule, i.e. Baten Kaitos : Les ailes éternelles et l’océan perdu; the reason being Baten Kaitos is an old latinization of the modern Batn Qaytus, the arabic name for the Zeta Ceti constellation. Here Baten Kaitos is not more english than french, since it’s two arabic proper names written in latin characters, so I have the feeling the whole sentence can be read as french, with two proper names for the series title.
• https://vgcollect.com/item/178382: this one I would again apply french rule, i.e. Crash Bandicoot : La Vengeance de Cortex; the reason being Crash Bandicoot is the name of the main character, even in the french translation (and bandicoot, the animal, is written the exact same in english and french).

Hope that helped.

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Error Listings and Rejected Edits 2025

« on: March 22, 2025, 04:02:56 am »

What do you mean the entire text entirely?

Example, this entry, the item title would be 機動戦艦ナデシコ ～やっぱり最後は「愛が勝つ」？～
https://vgcollect.com/item/45332

Thanks for the example, from that I reckon that entry we originally discussed has to be named “Heavy Rain”, and that’s it about mandatory content in the item’s title. Everything more is just there to distinguish it from the standard edition, right?

That leads us to the original questions, to which our discussions have me add a third:
1. Can the distinction go with “ - Édition Spéciale” instead of “ - L’Édition Spéciale”?
2. If so, will it be accepted if I submit a change accordingly?
3. If not, what would be better? “ - Special Edition [FR]”? “ (BCES 00797/S)”? Keeping “ - L’Édition Spéciale” (this one I propose out of complete fairness, but I still deem it wrong)?

Thank you in advance for answering those.

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Error Listings and Rejected Edits 2025

« on: March 21, 2025, 10:30:14 am »

The actual correct way that things should be named is using the original text entirely. Meaning no translations or transliterations and using the native text for non-Latin languages. And then apply language filters onto the item that can be selected by the user. However, we do not currently have this luxury so we needed to create rules that would apply to all items in all cases, to the best of our ability. The result is that there will be instances where the rules will make sense for 99% of things and not for a minorty. We'll have to deal with that until we come up with a better solution that covers all items. Because while we can put little bits of information into the Adv Guide about certain languages, we cannot allow the DB to get to a point where certain portions are only understood by people from a certain region. We already have that with the rest of the internet!

If you or any other native speakers (of any language) want us to add any particulars to the new language post in the Adv Guide, you can post about it here:
https://vgcollect.com/forum/index.php/topic,10891.0.html

What do you mean the entire text entirely?
The entire title? Then in this case it’s just Heavy Rain, and remains the need to differentiate from the standard edition.
The entire text making it to the front box? Then in this case it is still just Heavy Rain, so nothing’s solved.
The title as readable from the case’s edge? Then again, just Heavy Rain…

On contrary to other games, absolutely nothing but the cardboard box, the voucher and the included Origami distinguishes this non-standard edition from the standard one.
From there, and if you strive for accessibility regardless of language, I am perfectly fine with using english as a lingua franca, again only when nothing in the title nor on the front or edge of the case appears that helps distinguish an edition from another, for a same (sub)region (I am certainly not questionning the rules for the 99% of things where no such problem appears, neither for the examples cited earlier by dhaabi, where a specifying text for the edition appears on the front).

Wrapping up info collected until then, the non-standard edition of Heavy Rain targetting France market is inconsistently described as the Édition Spéciale on the back cover, Édition Collector on the voucher, and none of these made it to the front nor the edge of the case.
Quite possibly other, if not all, non-standard european editions of the game share the same inconsistency. Crawling through ebay listings to check what can be put in a language not the one of the website, thus that cannot be expected to be understood by everyone here, seems like going quite the opposite as what said you’d like to achieve.
Then, why not make a single choice, sticking to english (Special Edition, Collector’s Edition, Non-standard Edition, etc.) and apply it consistently among all european non-standard editions of the game, accompanied with a TLD? That seems fairly understandable and in line with how a lot of items are already identified in the database.

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Error Listings and Rejected Edits 2025

« on: March 21, 2025, 02:43:33 am »

I understand that. Nonetheless, the game, even in its special edition, is just named “Heavy Rain”. Whatever appears on the box that discriminates it from the standard edition does not change the fact that, for this game, the special edition does not have a different title than the standard one.

Forcing yourselves to identify a common bit of text common, from one language to another, to all regional variants of such entries, all the while disregarding concerned regions natives’ inputs in the process until addressed over days-long discussions on the forum, seems a rather clunky process in my humble opinion, if not counter-productive.

Then, why not harmonising to a fairly easier solution to implement (i.e. “ - Special Edition [TLD]” everywhere)? (again, only for this kind of case where the non-standard edition sports the exact same title as the standard one). If the problem is that does not abide the rules, maybe we should take that as a hint that said rules may be ill-fitted to some unplanned cases, and might benefit being updated.

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Error Listings and Rejected Edits 2025

« on: March 20, 2025, 12:51:34 pm »

All of the other regional entries for this item are straightforward in mentioning Special Edition.

That is precisely the reason why I originally submitted it as “Special Edition [FR]”.

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Error Listings and Rejected Edits 2025

« on: March 19, 2025, 01:53:38 pm »

Also, to say the L is "often" dropped implies it sometimes isn't. While it doesn't matter based on the argument I'm presenting, there are clearly items which don't drop the L, such as with the aforementioned 69326. This can be compared to items which do drop the L, like MDK - Edition Speciale.[/font]

Grok said “often”. As a native french speaker I cannot stress enough how the definite article there feels wrong.

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Error Listings and Rejected Edits 2025

« on: March 19, 2025, 01:50:50 pm »

This argument posits that "ÉDITION SPÉCIALE" alone is the edition name, as "L'" is a definite article that functions within the sentence "CONTENU DE L'ÉDITION SPÉCIALE" but isn’t essential to the name of the edition. In French, edition names often omit articles when formalized (e.g., "Édition Collector" vs. "L'Édition Collector"), and the core identifier here is "ÉDITION SPÉCIALE" (Special Edition). The reasoning is that "CONTENU DE" (contents of) indicates what follows is the edition being described, and "L'" is incidental to that description.

^ This essentially.

Here the “L’Édition Spéciale” mention cherry picked three words among the first sentence of a textbox on the back of the cover. Why would the cherry pick of two words be less acceptable than three?

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Error Listings and Rejected Edits 2025

« on: March 18, 2025, 12:44:27 pm »

Again, it is, and that’s not disputed there since it’s dhaabi who spotted it and updated the item in consequence.

What I argue is, for the title itself keeping the L’ is unnatural.

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Error Listings and Rejected Edits 2025

« on: March 18, 2025, 11:34:16 am »

To be frank I deeply regret this stance. Not crediting actual developpers seems so distant from the passion I feel for the medium and the people behind, I just cannot understand it.
Though there is the subsidiary argument that kind of make sense for a few of my Capcom games who suffered the same treatment over the last few days, I cannot fathom Brütal Legend being credited to EA, to which Double Fine has never been a subsidiary.

I am at the point where I actually refrain from updating some of my items since it very well could mean doing so would put the mods attention to some fields that this rule’d deem as wrong information, which I’d consider strict accuracy.

Anyway, on a lighter note, a few days back I added the french version of the special edition of Heavy Rain on PS3 there: https://vgcollect.com/item/280949
dhaabi rightfully corrected it with the Édition Spéciale mention readable from the back cover, but keeping the definite article L’, which makes as little sense in a title in french as it does in english (the english entry goes with “Heavy Rain - Special Edition”, not “Heavy Rain - The Special Edition”).
I proposed a first edit with Édition Collector (being the words I remember being widely used in press and whatnot back when the game was issued), only to stand corrected by what appears on the back, fair point.
So, then I proposed two other edits with “Heavy Rain - Édition Spéciale” (keeping what’s on the box, but removing the definite article L’), only to be rejected for, presumably, the same reason, thus despite me using the description box as a comment section as I had been invited to a long time ago, for another change (here: https://vgcollect.com/forum/index.php/topic,9928.msg169814.html#msg169814 - or at least that’s how I understood it back then, since my description was rejected but the change of platform accepted).
Anyway, if I suggest this edit again (Édition Spéciale instead of L’Édition Spéciale), can it be accepted? If not, why?

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Error Listings and Rejected Edits 2025

« on: March 17, 2025, 04:53:15 pm »

I understand that well, but then and once we set the software apart, nothing related to the production of the physical item relates to what a developper does, to my understanding:
- Designing and moulding a plastic case is not development.
- Designing and printing a cover is not development.
- Designing and printing a disc art is not development.
- Writing, correcting, structuring and printing a manual is not development, same go for the various leaflets that are part of some physical items.
- Translating the dialogs of a game is not development.
- Depending on the tools implementing the translation can be development indeed, but so far from the full implementation of a game that no honest developper would scratch the name of the original authors. Same goes for adaptation to PAL quirks (50Hz output from the top of my head).
- Compiling the software and pressing the disc is not development.

For an instance like this, I would widely prefer to put a line into description like this:
Cover branded as developped by Capcom, Co., Ltd.

I don’t know what Capcom, Co., Ltd. considered they had developped in this item. Nor if they even considered it at all, since the item must have been actually published by Electronic Arts and not Capcom, given the warranty contact details in the manual, both for France and Netherlands (imho that makes the entry “objectively”, whatever that means, wrong, in addition to blatantly innacurate). That actually has me thinking some agreement must have happened between (some) video game companies for organising themselves the publication of PS2/3 games in Europe. But that’s not the point.

Point is: Clover developped God Hand. Capcom adapted it (translation, 50Hz), chose to publish it on NA and european markets. For the latter Capcom must have delegated (poorly) the job to EA.

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Video Game Database Discussion / Re: Error Listings and Rejected Edits 2025

« on: March 17, 2025, 11:08:10 am »

None of this makes it less preposterous that God Hand was developped by Clover in Japan and NA, and by Capcom in Europe, according, as it stands, to vgcollect.