Randomly Select Platform Videos from Collection

[William Jones]

I mentioned this to Jason in the live stream. Since platform videos are being implemented now, there's been a big request to get great looking videos showcasing the associated platform.

However, I don't have a huge collection and I don't like showcasing games I don't have in my collection. My idea is to have the platform randomly select videos from games that I have in that associated platform so you can preview exactly what you own.

This also helps with the issue of owning games on different consoles (i.e. a Street Fighter II video sample for Genesis would be silly when you own Street Fighter II on SNES)

Instead of 30 second videos like it does in Emumovies, you can get a 5 second sample of each game before it randomly selects the next game so you can get a good sample of your game collection for each platform.

Another option could be allowing people to prioritize favorited games to only be shown randomly in the associated platform.

[Michael Saunders]

Came here to suggest pretty much the same thing. Love the idea of short, 5-second randomly selected videos from each game for that platform. Also, I saw someone else mention this, but when looking at a publisher/developer/genre/series etc, you could also select random videos from those games too.

[William Jones]

Exactly Michael. It's all about displaying the games you own to me. If this was implemented in all of the other Big Box views too (i.e. "View Genres", "View Series", View Region" etc.) then you'd never have to scour the internet for a "First-Person shooter genre video" a "Ratchet and Clank series video" or a "Japanese region video". All of these would auto-populate because they'd randomly select videos from games within these filters.

I've heard Jason mention the idea of playlists. That would be cool, but it could overcomplicate things or even limit the functionality of randomly selected videos imo. Maybe an idea for that is to either play only videos from games in your favorites list or, a really cool feature (for the "View Series" filter specifically) would be an option to view game videos chronologically based on the release date metadata. It'd be cool to hover over "Super Mario Bros." on the "View Series" filter and see (if all of these games are in your collection) a "Mario Bros." five-second clip, followed by "Super Mario Bros.", "Super Mario Bros. 2" etc. or whatever next game you have in that series that follows chronologically.

Lastly, one cool feature would be to have the clear logo for the game being randomly showcased, appear on the bottom-right corner of the screen. The reason is that when you have hundreds of NES games or whatever the case, it can be easy to forget which game is being displayed. Plus it would look killer. :)

[Stephen Dail]

I may be missing the intent, as it appears this is already an available option (see screenshot in link below:)

https://www.timekills.org/images/RandomGameForPlatform_BigBox.png

The third choice under Options/Videos is "Use Random Game Videos for Missing Platform Videos"