How do we treat online games that along the years suffered modifications, most of the times graphical upgrades/enhancements. Example: I have added the game Poppit! to the database. The original Poppit! looked something like this and was developed in-house by Pogo. The current Poppit! looks like this, was developed by Magellan Interactive and released sometime in 2010.

Another case is Void, a game I just submitted. The original version was called Asteroids, was developed by the same developer and the only difference seems to be a better design for the ship (it's not a triangle anymore, it's a claw thingy) and some copyright lines, maybe some improved special effects as well.

The question is, do we treat them as the same game belonging to a single entry with multiple release dates, or two different entries?

If the differences are vast, and it also has a different developer involved, a new game entry would be better. If the changes are merely updates, even when it improves the game in many ways, those can be incorporated in descriptions.

Battle for Wesnoth probably doesn't look like our screenshots show anymore, but we deal with its evolution by adding new release dates.

Hmph, kept saying I should add some shots of 1.10 of BoW, but didn't when I struggled with Dead Water (supposedly the new campaign in this version? don't know, saw it somewhere, it's the first version I play) and haven't tried since... And now after the HDD failed I'm sitting quietly on this old backup one till I get a replacement, not installing any games.

Thanks guys. Seems new release dates will suffice for now.

What would be great would be an option to add tech-specs corresponding to each version when each differs greatly to the the version from which the existing tech-specs were taken. There are 5 different version releases of the Windows version of Hong Kong Mahjong, each with different minimum system requirements for example.

I'd say only the oldest and newest count. We could use tech-specs comment box to list the former.

So, would it be appropriate then to replace minimum requirement info with that of the latest/last-known version of the game ...moving the 'v1.0', or earliest known version's minimum specs to a comment?

This seems to be veering back toward lumping aesthetically variant ports of the same game.

I'm referring to different release versions from the same company all released for the same system (32bit Windows) with the Hong Kong Mahjong / Hong Kong Mahjong for Windows example, that excludes both the original DOS release and the initial Windows version which was 16bit which falls under the Windows 3.x category (not yet in the d/b, currently pending).

Version? Part? numbers can be found on the original solo CD releases printed on the discs as HKM02 (16bit, excluded from this conversation) / HKM03 (32bit), HKM04 (32bit), HKM05 (32bit)... (haven't found an HKM01 yet, maybe the DOS version was this??). So I should have said 3 different versions not 5 in my initial question.

Anyway, the most noticeable difference between the 32bit versions is the addition of support for larger screen resolutions in the later versions, and a few differences in the minimum system requirements. That is what left me wondering how such a situation should be handled here.

I just mean to say that plenty of games show more difference between MS-DOS version 1 and MS-DOS version 5 than between MS-DOS version 5 and Amiga version 1 but lump in the above case and split in the latter.

We handle it weirdly inconsistently. Text adventure games with optional vector illustrations get different entries from the same games on other non-graphical platforms, though they can be solved with the same walkthrough (because after all, how can a game be a member of both "genres" Interactive Fiction AND Interactive Fiction With Graphics?) BBS door games with optional graphical terminal software are kept together with the same games played in textmode. Games with big differences between v1 and v5 generally are kept in the same entry, with release dates noted and version number noted in eg. screenshots. And of course versions in different translation with eg. different title screens, character names, bosses, blood effects etc. are also kept together.

OK, I see you're point, it's exactly what lead me to ask the question.

The most extreme example I can think of is the one I added release data for (after being told that the pre-version 9.0 2D versions of the game and the later 3D versions were the same game and shouldn't be split): http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/kyodai/release-info

^the dude who made the game was rather extreme OCD. That, along with having his own website equaled a release-a-week in some cases...

...each one of those would likely have different minimum system requirements (if I could find minimum system requirements for each that is).