1) is a regular expression problem with mysql, i think all that is needed to fix this is the proper escape sequence for the '(' and '|' characters. the slash '\' isn't enough or the right special escape character. I thought i had a possible fix for this but i forgot it, i'll try to look at the mysql docs and return.(posted 8976 days ago)2) This is a similar regular expression problem. "^[0-9]" should return all games that start with numbers but the '[' and ']' characters aren't being recognised as special characters. The problem could be that you need to give a special sql statement to look for regular expressions in that particular collumn.
Bonus) this is probably very doable, if zwaxy has enough time.