Is there any site that actually lets you search for games?

I'm not asking for much: I want to search for games by platform, genre, rating, and date. This is possible on metacritic.com, but it is hidden and if you're able to find it, it does not seem to actually work. It is not possible at all on allgame.com as far as I can tell. Here on gamespot.com/new-games, I don't see how I can search by genre. Whatever I type into the genre field seems to be ignored and I have no clue what the search function with the three hearts within the genre field is supposed to be doing.

Does anybody actually search for games? Am I crazy and/or an imbecile? Anyone know of a way to do what I need?

for some reason, this site included, one often finds a single game quicker by doing a freakin google search. it's unbelievable how pathetic game and rating searches are on this site and others.

it's almost as if they do it purposefully.

it didn't use to be this bad.

@udubdawgz1: Thank you. Good to know I'm not going crazy. It's absolutely mind-boggling that a site that specializes in ratings and game information would no longer allow you to actually search for anything in a reasonable manner. How is it that everyone doesn't complain about this? Is it part of this ludicrous trend to remove and/or hide functionality from sites and apps, presumably to make them simpler and more phone and tablet-friendly?

Update: gamerankings.com doesn't allow you to search a release date range, but at least it actually seems to work. Unbelievable that I still haven't found a site that does a basic search by genre, date range, and rating, which SHOULD BE THE MAIN FUNCTION OF A GAMES SITE.

@andrew73249:

GiantBomb.com

son.

yep, giantbomb.com is a nice game searching site, thus it's a part of Gamespot.

@andrew7343 have you tried mobygames.com - it's a kind of a game database:)

this sit used to be good for looking up games, but they pretty much destroyed the site when they "upgraded it". it was like "look at the pretty design but we took all of the good features away for it to look like this."

@behardy24 Giantbomb would be fine, except (correct me if I'm wrong) the portion you can search with customizable options is not a review aggregator like metacritic, it only lets you search by user reviews. Plus, it's not smart about things like filtering out games with a five star average rating that have only been rated by one random person.

@nikcar89 Mobygames is about as good as Gamespot, in other words, worthless.

@jcopp72 Yes, it's the trend for web designers to say "let's hide and/or get rid of almost all the functionality on our site so it will look good on an iPhone."

this site used to be good at searching for games. Since they updated it over the years its become crappy.

Doesn't get any better than Mobygames. Well, actually it does, but I can't cite some of my specific sources here, or I will be struck by lightning ;)

I don't fully get what your saying. If you could, please elaborate. Thanks!

Certainly. At http://www.giantbomb.com/games/ there is a type of advanced search that lets you enter various options like platform, date range, genre, and minimum score. However, these scores are not from professional reviewers (unlike the scores calculated by say, Metacritic), they are just the ratings given by members of Giantbomb. In addition, if for example I search for games with a minimum 4 star score, I'm flooded with hundreds of games, more than half of which have only one or two ratings, with no way to sort by number of reviews or any other easy way of weeding those unreliable reviews out.

The best one I've found so far, http://www.gamerankings.com/browse.html, lets you search by platform, genre, release year (but not a date range unfortunately), and number of reviews. You can't search by score, but you can sort by score, unlike at Giantbomb. Plus, the scores at Gamerankings are based on reviews from other, professional websites. It's a review aggregator.

Do tell.

Denied.

Oh, I see. Never knew about that. That does sound like issue. Still prefer GB though.

Thanks for explaining! I appreciate it. ;)