Hi all,
I've found thegamesdb.net to be even slower than usual lately, I guess their servers are under constantly heavy load. There are now a couple of good alternatives which I think would be great to incorporate into Attract Mode when scraping game info.
Mobygames are alpha testing their api
http://www.mobygames.com/forums/dga,2/dgb,4/dgm,231400/Screenscraper.fr , although a French website, has an equally good selection of console games and even includes wheel art (!). This has been successfully integrated into Sselph's scraper, which is highly regarded within the RetroPie comminity.
