Shelf Life: Darkadia
The RPS Social Club this Saturday wasn't all drinking and progessively more excitable and less intelligible video game conversation. Us being geeks, there was also a certain amount of showing one another cool stuff on our smartphones, cool stuff like Darkadia, which came to me courtesy of RPS reader Flimgoblin. In alpha at present, Darkadia is a free service that lets you display all the games you own on a virtual shelf, and I like it quite a lot.
This video of a baby penguin being tickled also did the rounds at one point. Aw!
At present, the cool things about Darkadia are simply its enormous catalogue of box art (harvested from the Giant Bomb database) that covers everything from 1980s releases to modern indie games, and that you can choose to view your collection by games you "love", creating your own, personal Hall of Fame, games you own but haven't finished, or even games that you own but haven't played yet.
All good stuff, and Darkadia's roadmap of planned features here includes Steam integration.
I'm hoping we see services like this one honed in the coming years. I love digital distribution like I love my mother, but it's a shame not having a tangible collection to go pawing through. I look at the beautiful box art Locomalito organises for his freeware indie games (you can see it in the bottom right, there), and it saddens me that those aren't objects I can somehow add to a collection. More of this sort of thing!
What features would you like to see in a game display service, readers? I'd like a rudimentary physics engine so that I can use the mouse to throw games which displease me off the shelf and out of the window.