Backlog/game-tracking solutions

[SriK]

Does anyone know of any good sites to help you keep track of your backlog, what you're currently playing, what you want to play, etc.? For a while I was using a bunch of text files for this purpose, separated by genre and each containing notable or interesting-looking titles I hadn't played yet, and adding comments or ratings beside games' titles as I got around to them. Then I found out about a site called Backloggery (http://www.backloggery.com/), which seemed promising at first to help make the process more organized. My main problems in the end were the lack of text space (even in its larger "comments" box the site barely allows enough characters for a paragraph's worth of text per game, whereas I'd like to be able to save notes and other stuff after playing that I could edit and elaborate into a full review later, or at least be able to record my impressions to a decent degree of detail after finishing a game) and the site's general ugliness/tackiness, so I stopped using it after a bit.

The reason this came up in my mind again is because a while back I found about a cool site called Letterboxd (http://letterboxd.com), which has almost all of the functionality I'd want in a site like this... except it's for film rather than games. The interface is great and very easy to use, and it's aesthetically very clean as well -- no useless buttons or huge advertisements cluttering up pages, and the movie-specific pages make even the most hilariously shitty ones look somewhat legitimate. I've been using it heavily for the past few months, since when I went to college the amount of games I played decreased dramatically and the amount of films I watched increased (due to lack of a decent gaming setup, lack of long contiguous time segments, social stuff, work, roommates, etc.) Now that I'm back home for the summer however I'm looking into building a new gaming-specific box for our home theater and playing a lot of the stuff I've missed over time, so a tool like this would be useful.

So I'm hoping something like what I'd want currently exists, and if anyone has any good sites they know of I'd really appreciate it if they could share. And if anyone has any cool/efficient offline solutions I'd be interested in those as well.

[icycalm]

http://www.gamengai.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3078

Sites that help you keep track of your collection/backlog

I've noticed Shou uses Backloggery [ > ], and he has a big collection, so it's probably a good site. But there seem to be quite a few of them around, and I am wondering which one's the best, so I don't invest too much time inputting my collection in one, only to find out later that there's something much better. So here are the ones I know of so far:

http://backloggery.com/
https://www.playfire.com/
http://rfgeneration.com/
https://www.gamerdna.com/

If you have tried some of them, post your impressions here. Also, let me know if there are more sites of this nature I could check out.

Note that Backloggery, true to its name, is a backlogging site. It also records collections, but its main goal is to help you complete them. There's a lot of extraneous features that are unnecessary if all you're looking to do is list games.

Anyway, I'm not a fan of online sites that could go down anytime and require online access. I just use Notepad to edit a local text file and then upload it online for backup every once in a while. For anybody who needs a line-item inventory for personal use, no matter how many systems or games he/she owns, this solution is perfect.

For those who record more or want to show their collection to others, an Excel spreadsheet uploaded to Google Docs has all the columns and sharing options you'd need.

For those who are more tech-savvy and are looking for even more data normalization, you can create a custom database (or use a template) on simple, user-oriented database management systems such as FileMaker and Access. You can input and view just about anything you could think of relating to game collections on a database and publish it to a personal website.

I use a few actually. As Ganelon said, backloggery is more about conquering the backlog monster.

One that I started playing with is called collectedit.com since it has an iOS app but it's lacking a lot of functionality and integration into SNS sites which could make it much more relevant.

None of these sites contains my full collection due to a few factors:
- game/hardware releases are usually tied to the site owner's region (ie Genesis over Mega Drive for the US, sometimes game releases are tied to some kind of retail info database which again is US or EU centric and missing Japanese and Asian releases, one site tells me that I can only digitally own arcade games lol)
- UI issues
- remote accessibility
- import/export functionality


Personally, I have made a custom DB back in the day which powered my old neo-classic site but recently moved to Excel/Google Drive.

I hear you on the region thing. That's what I always hated about UGTZ.... they listed every parameter for a game...except the region. :|

3 cheers for a custom DB.

http://www.pcedaisakusen.net is really nice and has a complete list for all regions, but of course it's PCE and TG-16 only.

Too bad something like this doesn't exist for ALL consoles. Therefore it's Excel for me.

After dicking around with backloggery for a little while, I've come around to the custom database idea. Is Excel the best one to go for, or could anyone recommend something better in terms of ease of use and versatility? I am using Windows, by the way...

I prefer Google Drive spreadsheets to Excel. They don't seem hugely different, but with Drive it's real easy to make custom submission forms and I like the whole access-anywhere thing.

I use Backloggery, but it's more for keeping a basic log of what I've been playing than it is for keeping track of my collection or backlog.

After dicking around with backloggery for a little while, I've come around to the custom database idea. Is Excel the best one to go for, or could anyone recommend something better in terms of ease of use and versatility? I am using Windows, by the way...

It really depends upon what you're trying to do with the data and technically, what you're familiar with.

My first DB was mySQL flavor which I designed a web UI around but I didn't build any kind of data analytics around it for tracking costs/currencies. I don't think that applies for everyone but I like to keep track of costs, FX rates, dates, etc so I can look at trends in pricing in my own collection. :D I know how to do that fairly easily in Excel so that's what I use at the moment and it's easy to data mine. No site is going to cover what I need, things like arcade PCB monitor orientation, screen inversion etc.

So the consensus is unanimous and includes me now: some form of custom database, depending on your level of expertise, is the best solution to this issue.

On another note, I am only interested in game data for this catalogue project, not commentary on games. I generally dump my comments in the forum, with the exception of games I plan on reviewing, in which case the comments go into a text file to be included in the reviews. And this is what I urge you to do too. What good are comments on a tracking site or database that no one will ever see? You are free to make or bump as many threads here as you want, and who knows, perhaps you'll even find someone who has something to say about them.

[Bread]

I used a poorly organised set of text files and spreadsheets for a while. I'm in the process of moving my information into outline format with Fargo.

http://fargo.io/

Outliners generally do not provide anything near the power of a relational database. They just let you organise text into whatever hierarchical structure you choose. Fargo in particular uses Dropbox to store the files, in a standard XML format. It's also under development so later features might enable more advanced automated data extraction and manipulation. One important, unfortunately currently missing feature is search.

I'm keeping track of games, movies and books in my outline. Screenshot:
http://i.imgur.com/xKPdfJC.gif