I felt the need to track my old video games and I wanted to be able to do it from my smartphone and my computer. After a bit of search, I had the idea to do it with a wordpress-blog. I know that at least one other person (Hi @streakmachine) wants to do something similar, I thought it might be a good idea to explain what I am doing.

I am using a recent Wordpress. The theme I am using is called Market. The plugins I have installed are:

Then I created categories for each console I want to track games for. Other interesting data I want to easily filter for I add via tags. The title of the article is the name of the game. If it is a Japanese game it depends on which name I usually use when I talk about a game. Often this is the US-title and if it is a Japanese-game where I use the US-title usually I just add (Japanese). For each article I use now the following boilerplate text: Japanese Name: The Japanese name in Kana and Kanji with a translation. Other Names: Some games have different names per region which are commonly known. For example Seiken Densetsu is known as Final Fantasy Adventure in the US and as Mystic Quest in Europe. Release Date: YYYY-MM-DD Code: There is a code on Nintendo-modules that identify them Packaging: Do I own the packaging? Manual: Do I own the manual Battery Date: YYYY-MM - if the module has a battery it is useful to know how old is approximately Condition: I am not sure yet how I want to quantify the condition of the module, manual and packaging Genre: Which genre is the game part of. The genre is used also as a tag. Rating in tests: How was the game rated? I try to add the Famitsu-, IGN- and Video Games-rating (the last one is my favorite German videogame-magazine from back in the day) Personal Rating: a rating from 0-5 in .5-steps if I have a opinion Completed: Did I finish the game. Also added as a tag. Now you can see my pile of shame and I can think if I really need that other game. Wikipedia-article: A link to the English Wikipedia-article Language Skills: Which language skills are needed. More a service for other people Notes: Some personal notes which can grow up to a blog-article in its own rights

Then I add some tags, usually the genre and whether I completed the game or not. Maybe I should add the release year. I add this because I can search then easier for it.

With my iPhone I make a square picture of the module, packaging and manual. I add the picture with the size 300x300 to the article as a feature picture via the iPhone-app from Wordpress and put the picture on top of the article. The feature picture is needed to show it on the front page.

The last thing to mention is the archive-page which I create with the Archivist-plug in. The games are sorted by console and within that by alphabet. The entries look like this:

[archivist query=“category_name=CATEGORY-SLUG&orderby=name&order=asc”]

That’s it I think. It seems to work but at one point I’d like to add better photos. I can now easily search the games, have a look which I have, can see which I did not yet complete etc.