Like a ton of other collectors out there I need a way to organize my video game collection.  Even with my modest collection of games I forget what I have from time to time so I downloaded a games organizer app on my phone to make sure I don’t make the mistake of buying a game I already own twice.  Or worse yet buy a duplicate at a higher price than the first one I got.  The app I downloaded and will be talking about today is Gameye.  It’s a free app for iOS and Android devices and here’s what I think about it.

Cataloging games sounds fun but it can also be a bit of a pain.  Depending on how you do catalog your collection it can be extremely time consuming.  I must say that Gameye makes the process much painless and more streamlined.  Gameye doesn’t just catalog your games, but also your systems, peripherals, and even toys to life (like amiibos).  On the Home Screen you can pick which list to go into and and check or add an item.  What I find pretty impressive is that it doesn’t just have the base models of systems either, but also the special editions as well. So if you were to put in ‘Nintendo 3DS’ in the search bar, nearly every model of 3DS ever made will show up.  However it isn’t a perfect list.  Some of the pictures don’t look the best and some don’t have pictures at all.  While trying to add my PlayStation, I entered PlayStation in the search bar and had to scroll quite a ways to get what I was looking for.  It not only included the original, but every version of the PlayStation ever made.  Points for including so many versions but they missed the mark in making me hunt down the correct entry.

What I do think this app does very well is it includes a barcode scanner and it can recognize certain game cartridges as well.  The barcode scanner is by far my favorite feature because all it has to do is scan the barcode on the game and BAM!  It’s right there and you can put in the condition of the game such as if the game is loose or CIB.  It can even tell whether or not it’s a special edition game or a regular print which is handy.  However what it doesn’t do is tell which one is a “Greatest Hits” reprint or not.  My copy of Final Fantasy Tactics is a Greatest Hits copy but when I scanned the barcode, the regular black border popped up.  This can be rectified by just adding a note telling you which version it is.

The game cartridge scanner is a good idea but isn’t my favorite way to scan games into my collection.  In theory it scans the label of the game, you touch it and then enter the information like the condition of the game and what not.  The selection of systems for this scanner is very limited by supporting only 8 systems.  Hopefully in updates to come more systems will be added like the Game Boy Advance.  I have to manually enter nearly my entire GBA collection because the cart scanner doesn’t support GBA games (yet).  Even with a system that it DOES support it’s still a little shoddy.  To confirm the game you have to touch the image over the label on your phone, but I’ve experienced that the game constantly changes and you’ll click the wrong game a lot.  As you can see the scanner doesn’t recognize my copy of Ice Hockey and instead thinks it’s a completely different game.  Also even when I tap the screen to focus my camera, it doesn’t focus in completely.  Hence the blurry photo.  It happened mostly with my Game Boy titles and when I tried to scan my NES games it barely even registered.  At that point entering the game in manually is way easier than the scanner.  Even for games that are on multiple platforms finding the one you have isn’t hard and much less of a pain than the scanner.

Aside from a few entry woes, the app does have some bells and whistles that are really neat.  The app is connected to pricecharting.com and when you put in an entry, the going prices (like loose, CIB and New) for the game will pop up.  As an added bonus the Metacritic score is also shown for the game if that’s available.  You can customize the games you want to see in your collection by title or release date and if you need to see what games for specific consoles you have you can go to the advance settings to change it.  That would be extremely useful when one is going to a retro game expo and can’t remember what exactly they have in their collection.  The app itself isn’t completely perfect but for what it does well it makes it an invaluable tool for my collection.  Once you get it and start playing around with it it’ll be a breeze to enter new games into your catalog and actually really fun to do.  I would highly recommend this app for my fellow retro game collectors who need a new or a portable way to put keep track of their game collection.