Hey vancouver community!
This is a c/p from a thread I made over on reddit, which I think might be of general interest.
Did you know the VPL has almost 1,800 video games on offer? (As of writing this)
I’ve never been happy with how difficult it is to find them and how little info is actually shown on the VPL website.
And I’m sure many of you either had no idea the library even had any video games available or potentially just gave up on borrowing one because searching is a bit of a pain.
All you need is a library card and you can borrow a maximum of 5 games at a time. The default loan period is one week and you can renew loans for games which are not in demand (on hold).
Enough with the intro, here are my collections on HowLongToBeat.
I’ve made collections for each console separately, so that’s it’s far easier to filter them separately, and searching inside said collections is also mostly instantaneous.
And here are direct links to them:
- PS3 games
- PS4 games
- PS5 games
- Switch games
- Wii games
- Wii U games
- Xbox 360 games
- Xbox One games (including Series X games with Smart Delivery)
- Xbox Series X games
Once on a specific collection page, it defaults to a “Rating” sort (this is community-driven, same with the “time to beat” shown for each game) and “Card View” (with cover / title / time to beat and notes), but those can be adjusted to your liking.
I’ve included links to the game VPL listing(s) in the notes for each of them, as well as the corresponding search filter on the VPL website.
NB: Some games are missing from HLTB, so it’s not a 1:1 match, but I’m working on that.
And please let me know if you see any issues / wrong links/games or if you have any questions!
Agreed, a week is not nearly enough for a lot of games, which is why I really wanted to interface with HLTB.
If you want an excuse to get to Coquitlam, North Van or New West, for instance, you’ll see how most Lower Mainland libraries have longer borrowing times (usually 2 to 3 weeks) and pretty great selections too.