The Internet is a big place. In this new series we’ll take a look at different sites floating out there that we think are worth your time. If you have any sites that you think we should let people know about, leave a comment or drop us an email, podcast@perpetualgeekmachine.net.

As an adult over-burdened with responsibilities not left with a huge amount of time or “fun money” to spend on games it’s often important to me to know about how long a game will take to finish. In the past simply Googling “[name of game] hours” sufficed in finding a review where they mentioned the approximate length of the game. Now there’s a web site that acts as a one-stop source of that specific information, HowLongToBeat.com. Hit the jump to find out more about what the site has to offer. 

The concept of the site is simple: compile user-generated information on specific games to approximate how long it will take to beat them. Of course it doesn’t take everyone the same amount of time to complete a game, nor does everyone play those games in the same manner. With that in mind How Long To Beat presents median, average, lowest and highest times for five different categories: speed runs, speed runs with 100% completion, main story, main story plus additional quests/medals/unlockables and completionist plus how many people have submitted times for each category for that game.

To take full advantage of what HowLongToBeat.com has to offer you should create an account and start submitting your own times for the games you’ve completed recently and add those still sitting on your shelf to your “backlog” to see how long it will be until they’re all finished. Users are encouraged to give the game a rating or add additional comments when submitting times to the database.

The site doesn’t seem to be wildly popular yet but there is already an impressive list of submitted games. From a technical point of view it runs fast, the layout is clean if not all that fancy but it doesn’t really need to be. The information is presented well and you’d have a hard time getting lost or not finding something. Hopefully its popularity will continue to grow so that the times will become even more accurate. For this time-pressed gamer HowLongToBeat.com was a welcomed discovery.