Jay St. Video Games

This place wants $ 20 for Mario/​duck hunt on NES. Twenty dollars. TWENTY. DOLLARS. I would rather take a big old fat one right up my dumper than pay the insane prices that Jay Street asks. This place is a blight on the holy kingdom that is Crossgates Mall. It smells like old Cheetos, stale farts, and broken dreams in there.

FIrst I’ll start with the good. The store was clean and had a good selection of titles. Most of the prices were in line with Amazon and GameStop. I was going to purchase an Xbox One game until I encountered the salesman.
I asked him if they accepted bitcoin — because many gaming companies do including STEAM, Newegg, Tiger Direct, Microsoft’s Xbox Live — and he snickered then joked that they accept some made up coin. I would have been ok with «no.»
Anyway, I ended up buying a digital copy of the game with bitcoin through Microsoft.

Great place with friendly and helpful staff and they offered me WAY MORE then GameStop did on my games when I traded them in.

If I could give this place no stars, I would.
My fiancé and I went the Crossgates location on a whim because we decided to check out a retro video game store in the Albany area that was close to our hotel.
Upon arrival, we stepped inside, the store was very neat and organized but we were not greeted by the employee at the register.
We decided to look around to see what games they had to offer, we first checked out the case at the register, the case had nothing but overpriced games that were marked $ 100.00 over their value (they obviously assume every customer is an idiot and think they don’t know what certain retro games are really worth).
As my fiancé stayed by the register to look at the games in the case, I decided to walk around and see what other games they had to offer (I had an itch to spend money on a game).
As I looked around, I found a game I wanted finally but realized that of course it was a higher price than it should have been so I put it down.
I continued my search, as I did, a mentally challenged man was looking at some games, he decided to ask the cashier a couple of questions about a couple of games on the shelf (he took a few cases off the shelf to bring to the cashier so that he could ask his questions).
I could tell the cashier was getting annoyed with him because he was very short with his words towards the man and impatient. The man walked back to the shelf to bring more game cases over to the cashier, a second employee that came out of nowhere screamed at the man to stop taking the cases off the shelf and that the cases needed to stay on the shelf so that they stayed organized. God forbid this employee did any work other than walk around pretending he cared about anything other than himself.
At that point, I was not happy about that, I felt the cashier was being extremely rude towards the man.
I decided to stand by my fiancé as he continued to look at the games in the case. At that point the second employee that came out of nowhere also didn’t acknowledge us or bothered to be friendly and say hi.
My fiancé was taking a couple of pictures to show his friends back home in Connecticut all the great retro games in the case, at that point the second employee was pissed and said to him, «your camera on your phone is on, your camera is on». My fiancé then nicely explained to him that he wanted to show his friends back home all the great stuff they had.
To smooth things over, my fiancé decided to be nice and make a joke to lighten the mood, that didn’t go over well with the employees.
My fiancé proceeded to ask them if they had a particular game in stock, the second employee looked it up and proceeded to tell him they had it at one of their other stores. My fiancé let them know that we didn’t live here and that we’re on a timely schedule. The second employee proceeded to state that they could ship. I chimed in stating that we’re leaving the following day. Than the second employee with an attitude said, «we would ship it to your address».
As I looked down pretending all of that didn’t happen, one of the employees under his breath said, «waste of time».
At that point I kept my mouth shut because they would have been verbally abused.
I have never experienced such terrible customer service in my life. I work at a job that deals with customers on a daily basis, I would never treat a customer the way these two incompetent employees treated everyone else.
I get it, you hate life and video games, but seriously? Whoever owns this store, be prepared for your store to go out of business, it is heading that way. You obviously don’t know how to staff or run a store.
If I had to choose between you and Gamestop, I would rather shop at Gamestop.

I hate to say it but the workers here are complete assholes. A bit too arrogant for Jay street employees. The guy called me an idiot for buying a particular game from my childhood.
On another occasion I asked an employee how their knock-​off gamecube controllers were. He scoffed at my question, «what do you think?»
Well I unfortunately listened to him and bought the controller, which ended up breaking within the week.
Jay Street is severely overpriced. Most of the classic games you are looking for can be found cheaper online. If your trying to buy a modern game just go to gamestop.

My last review was taken down. im guessing because it wasn’t above 4 stars. but officially, i was told my review «lacks a firsthand customer experience.» BS. Actually, im not even surprised. This is classic Jay St. rhetoric. i have purchased nes games from these guys numerous times. When i was stupid i even bought a retron from them, a product that they promote heavily in their store. a tip to anybody just getting into retro games. DON’T BUY RETRONS! it may seem like a great deal but they are incompatible with a lot of great games, suffer from poor sound emulation and break so easily. The nes component in mine broke well within a week. Do you think that me returning it, or even getting store credit was «easy with them»?. no. Speaking of store credit, the money you’ll make on trades is abysmal. the owner is notorious for being a douche and runs the place basically like a gamestop that specializes in retro. Any semblance of community that you’d normally get from a mom’npop store is absent here. when i was trying to gather parts for my nes cart album and sell it locally in retro game stores around new york i was able to get support from numerous gamestores including GameXChange, Forgotten Freshness, PastimeLegends and even Video Games New York. Guess which one wouldn’t get back to me. Anyway, they have games and they’re priced high but thats honestly to be expected because of the high trafic real-​estate they’ve acquired, but really, why bother when there are so many better alternatives so close to them? One of the main draws of retro collecting (imo) is to get away from the soullessness of the modern game industry, i love getting to know the owners of these stores, hearing their past experiences and recommendations, and developing a true customer relationship with them, but once again, you wont find that here!

I always buy my classic games from Jay Street. They have a great selection and they have always priced matched for me. Returns and exchanges are also easy with them. I love the atmosphere and the people. Thank you Jay Street for bringing classic games back.

Absolutely epic. Talk about nostalgia.
Where else can you get a copy of Madden 1996 for SNES, including the box, for $ 1.99? Where else can you get ancient NES games that you’d never even heard of? Hell, where else can you walk into a store and walk out with a functioning NES console? This place is awesome.
They seem to have everything, and an impressive stock of it at that. The variety is huge: NES/​SNES, Intellivision (holy shit), Game Boy, Jaguar, Genesis, and even the newer stuff like PlayStation and Xbox. They also sell the emulator consoles, which are the third-​party systems developed to play the old games. Jay Street sells one that will play NES, SNES and Genesis games, and it’s only like $ 60 or so.
They also do new stuff, too. What’s notable about Jay Street’s new games is that they sell them for $ 5 less than everyone else does for the first week of release.
I really can’t speak highly enough of this business. I’m really glad I found them because they’re now my go-​to store for games. They have another location at Colonie Center, but I’ve only been to the one in Crossgates.