Backloggd Hidden Gems
A collection of games with ~100-500 plays and average scores of 4.0 or above. Roughly 7,200 games were manually and individually parsed to complete this list, so expect some accidental inclusions/omissions.
Backloggd's default rating sort takes its list of over 160,000 games and shortens it down to a little over 4,400. I suspect there's something in the backend that prevents a game from showing up in the overall average rating sort unless it meets a certain threshold of plays/reviews. Since there's (currently) no automatic search method to get around this, I've compiled this list in the hopes of giving some more empirically obscure titles a little more recognition.
DLC excluded. Mods included. Episodic games must be in complete collections to be included. Ports and remasters excluded if a more popular version of the game exists (ie. Red Dead Redemption's Switch port meets the initial criteria, but is excluded due to being a port of an already overwhelmingly popular game). Bundles generally excluded unless all games within the bundle are individually <500 plays.
Backloggd's default rating sort takes its list of over 160,000 games and shortens it down to a little over 4,400. I suspect there's something in the backend that prevents a game from showing up in the overall average rating sort unless it meets a certain threshold of plays/reviews. Since there's (currently) no automatic search method to get around this, I've compiled this list in the hopes of giving some more empirically obscure titles a little more recognition.
DLC excluded. Mods included. Episodic games must be in complete collections to be included. Ports and remasters excluded if a more popular version of the game exists (ie. Red Dead Redemption's Switch port meets the initial criteria, but is excluded due to being a port of an already overwhelmingly popular game). Bundles generally excluded unless all games within the bundle are individually <500 plays.
247 Games
11 Comments
Eeeeh! Astlibra Revision getting some love.
I can't do anything else but stand up and clap, this such an amazing work and one thta must have required a ton of research and effort; I don't doubt there are probably games that fit here yet to be added, but everything I've looked into that may possibly enter here was already on here, and that shows hoe much od a banger list this is. If I encounter a game that meets the critera and isn't on here I'll let you know, but for know, and again, amazing work!
Saturn Bomberman sweep.
Damn, this must've taken so much time scouring the site to add as many entries as possible, great work!
Also RIP Chants of Sennaar, you only had a few hours in this 🕊️
Also RIP Chants of Sennaar, you only had a few hours in this 🕊️
"Roughly 7,200 games were manually and individually parsed to complete this list, so expect some accidental inclusions/omissions."
Doing gods work. Could you elaborate more on this process? How did you find all these games to begin with when they're not a part of the list due to their current esoteric state?
Doing gods work. Could you elaborate more on this process? How did you find all these games to begin with when they're not a part of the list due to their current esoteric state?
@Bakkestaffen By default, Backloggd offers a "popularity" search. I can't pin down exactly how it works, because it really starts to fall apart once you get into the middle hundred pages, but it seems to mostly sort by the number of plays a game has. The current cutoff for the top end of 500 plays sits around Page 125, so I just had to work backwards until I got to the bottom end of 100 plays, which was around Page 324.
The rest of it was manually opening every single game on each page, checking to see if they had average scores of 4.0 or above, and then verifying that there weren't other versions of the game that were more popular (ie. some Japanese games showed up that didn't say they were ports or remasters, but they turned out to just be the Japanese titles of games that were better known by the English titles). Each page has 36 games; 36 games multiplied by 200 pages comes out to about 7,200 games.
I'd estimate it took about ten hours of active work to get through all of them, broken up over the course of two days. If Backloggd had a public API, I could have done all of this in about two minutes with mySQL.
The rest of it was manually opening every single game on each page, checking to see if they had average scores of 4.0 or above, and then verifying that there weren't other versions of the game that were more popular (ie. some Japanese games showed up that didn't say they were ports or remasters, but they turned out to just be the Japanese titles of games that were better known by the English titles). Each page has 36 games; 36 games multiplied by 200 pages comes out to about 7,200 games.
I'd estimate it took about ten hours of active work to get through all of them, broken up over the course of two days. If Backloggd had a public API, I could have done all of this in about two minutes with mySQL.
I see. That's an incredible job. This list also reminds me I got to get to the DS Japan only Chibi-Robo game sooner or later.
By the way, Nier, Trails From Zero, Skies of Arcadia, Tactics Ogre, VP:Lenneth, OneShot are all duplicates of more played games that are already on the charts. Why are they incuded here?
@Bakkestaffen Nier Replicant and OneShot are each different enough from later releases that I would consider them to be unique games. Skies of Arcadia is similarly distinct enough from its remake to count. Tactics Ogre is definitely debatable on whether or not you think Reborn is different enough. I agree that Valkyrie Profile Lenneth should go. Thanks for taking the time to look through these!
Skies of Arcadia: Legends is an enchanced port though, not a remake. What about Trails of Zero? Isn't that just an eralier version of Trails From Zero? Also, I found the SNES version of Dragon Quest III https://backloggd.com/games/dragon-quest-iii-soshite-densetsu-he-dot-dot-dot/ should be eligible for this list given it's rating, right?
LordDarias
4 months ago