Regions - metadata housekeeping and changes

Following the addition of South Africa last night when processing the Game Gear games focused my mind on regions again.

The Omni project attempts to be....

• Region agnostic - though my initial focus is on the USA, Europe & Japan, ultimately I would like to have games from all regions. There should be no bias to any one particular region in the quality of the metadata provided. Meaning, it doesn't matter if it's French/Spanish exclusive it should still exist and have been documented, with every effort made to provide complete metadata.
• Non-centric - I'm originally from England but have lived in Spain for the last 10 years... but this shouldn't matter. Meaning that there should be no bias to a particular region.

With this in mind you can start to see with some games that I'm trying to obtain an geographically accurate reflection for regional releases. I think I'm the only game database to identify East/West German NES releases?

Regions on the face of it should be simple, right? Well you would think so, but there is a lot of dilution with the metadata provided by the preservation group filename game x (USA, Europe) for example; like where in Europe? ahhh.. but we have the languages! hmmm.. my trust in that metadata is incredibly low because it's a mere indication of the language existence within the game but does not determine how it's been implemented:

• Full game
• Menu options
• Title screen
• NPC character
• Text
• Audio

The Omni project attempts to map the relationship between the retail metadata (OMNI_TITLE) and the file metadata (OMNI_DAT). Which goes some way to negating some of the guesswork.

Today I will perform some housekeeping tasks on the region metadata in the OMNI_TITLE table and I would also like to code a webpage that will allow you to focus on particular region. For example, if you are just interested in games released in Spain, you will be able to click the region and see all the games from released in Spain.

If you have any thought's or ideas surrounding regions it would be great to read them.

: )