A basic parser/API for http://www.gamefaqs.com and http://www.gamerankings.com

• bs4
• requests

This parser is only meant to perform human-like searches and requests on http://www.gamefaqs.com and http://www.gamerankings.com for retrieving information about your favourite video games. Its intent is to scrape basic information of a video game from http://www.gamefaqs.com or http://www.gamerankings.com, including description, release date, genre, developer, Metacritic score, and more. Furthermore, it's possible to retrieve the asked questions and, if any, their answers.

After including the files into your project, two base operations can be executed:

• Search a game by its name.
• Parse provided information about the game, given the link to its base info page.

To do so, following steps must be executed:

• Instantiate an object of the type GameFAQs. For the following requests to succeed, a header dictionary with the key 'User-Agent' must be specified. Example: gf = GameFAQs(headers={'User-Agent': 'The Spanish Inquisition'})

• To perform a search, a generator must be created by assigning the instantiated object's search_game(name)-method to it. Example search_generator = gf.search_game('Monty Python\s Complete Waste of Time').

• To retrieve the next max. 20 search results, access the generators next items. Example: search_result = next(search_generator).

• The search_resultcontains a list of those max. 20 search results, which themselves are dictionaries with the keys 'Name', 'Link', 'Genre', 'Company', 'Year', 'Consoles'. The 'Consoles' item itself is a dictionary with the keys 'Name', 'Link', containing the name of the system the game is on and the direct link to the system's version of the game.

• By providing a link, ideally retrieved from the search_result, the game information can be accessed. Before doing so, the requests for the base and/or advanced info page must be prepared and executed. This is the job of the gamesession(link, base, advanced, questions)-method of the GameFAQs-instance. By setting the base, advanced or questions parameter(s) to False, the base/advanced/questions info page(s) won't be requested and cannot be parsed afterwards. Example: gf.gamesession(link, base=True, advanced=True, questions=False)

• Now, the data can be accessed. The following methods of the GameFAQs instance can be used:

  • get_name(): returns the name of the game (base/advanced)
  • get_description(): returns the description of the game (base)
  • get_user_ratings(): returns user ratings of the game (owned by, difficulty, etc.) (base)
  • get_base_info(): returns platforms, developer, release date and - if provided - franchise, ESRB rating and Metacritic score (base)
  • get_full_base_info(): returns all of the above having a base-tag
  • get_title_info(): returns title info of the game, varies from game to game (advanced) (Example: multiplayers, full genre, Wikipedia link, ...)
  • get_versions(): returns different versions of the game with region, publisher, product ID, barcode, release date and rating (advanced)
  • get_dlc(): returns the names and gamefaqs-links to the games add-ons (advanced)
  • get_full_advanced_info(): returns all of the above having an advanced-tag
  • get_full_game_info(): returns all the information mentioned above
  • get_answered_questions(): returns answered questions, ordered by topic, including answer count and link to their details pages (questions_answered)
  • get_unresolved_questions(): returns unresolved questions, ordered by topic, including answer count and link to their details pages (questions_unresolved)
  • get_all_questions(): returns all questions, ordered by topic, including answer count and link to their details pages (questions_answered and questions_unresolved)
  • get_answers(link): returns the full question text and, if any, its answers including up- and downvotes (none required)

• To close the requests, call the close()-method of the GameFAQs instance. Example: gf.close()

The steps are completely analogous for http://www.gamerankings.com. The only available method after creating an instance and establishing a gamesession is get_reviews() which returns all reviewing media, the date of the review, the medium's specific rating, a standardized rating in the range [0%, 100%] and a link to the review.