Luke wrote:The thing that GameStop does so well on their site is keeping track of inventory. It's about a two hour round trip to my nearest retro store, so I'd love to be able to check a a store's inventory, which isn't as difficult as people make it out to be.
The basics of what I'd like to see for a web app for retro game stores:
Store location/hours/phone number/website
Google Earth view
Directions to store
Store specialty, if applicable
Game inventory of store, including prices of games/consoles
Customer reviews of store
Announcements of any specials/discounts/sales for the store
Mobile access (blackberry/iphone compatibility)
That's all I can of for now.
Yeah, these are features I would like to see.. An awesome idea!!
Odyssey,Vectrex,Atari 2600,5200,7800,Intellivision,Colecovision,NES,Master System,SNES,Genesis,32X,CD,CDX,Virtual Boy,TG-16,Neo-Geo AES,Jaguar+CD,PSX,PSOne,Saturn,3DO,N64,DC,PS2,Xbox,GCN,Wii,Xbox 360,PS3,GB,GB Pocket,GBC,Lynx,Game Gear,Nomad,NGPC,GBA,GBA SP,GB Micro,DS,PSP,PSP Slim,WS,WS Color,3DS,Vita,PC,iPhone,WiiU
A/V:55" Samsung 3D LED TV, Onkyo 7.1 TX-SR605 HTS My gaming collection
The whole store inventory thing is probably overkill. Just setting up the backend here would be a lot of work/money, plus the store owners would have to upkeep it.
What about a feature that allowed users to say "There's X game here for Y dollars"? It would be cool.
On arcade games I think a photo (For coolness), reviews of the game from the users and the condition of the machine. (Perfect, left gun doesn't work, etc). Also price because there's no reason not to have it.
Looking for a cool game? Find it in my blog! Latest post: Often, games must be difficult http://eriktwice.com/
I'm assuming you want to build something that integrates with data (mashup-style, perhaps) from Google Maps, Bing, or Yahoo Local.
I would allow tagged comments for each store/arcade. You would use a controlled tag vocab and allow people to flag comments as "Sale!", or "Specific Game" or something. That way users could comment on which games they've found in arcades or on sales. That's just an example.
But definitely info like name of store, address, phone number, and if available web site. Perhaps you could email or call store owners (or have dedicated forum members volunteer for this) and ask them if they'd like to contribute any information to your listings.
A sortable table view would also be kinda cool. Sort of a laundry list of stores in a given area.
I could probably persuade the owners of Titan Games in Battle Creek and Hocus Pocus in Traverse City to let me take pictures.
Sega Genesis (Model 2), Sega CD, Sega 32X, SNES, Nintendo 64, Gamecube, Game Boy Family, Phillips CD-i Model 910, NES, Atari 5200, Virtual Boy, Atari Jaguar, Playstations 3-4
