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The GameStick is an Android-based gaming system which plugs straight into your TV, and plays versions of mobile Android games which are tweaked to work with a gamepad. It’s not much bigger than a USB flash disk or TV tuner, and certainly beats the much-hyped Ouya for size. It’s another Kickstarter-funded micro-console, too, which easily surpassed its funding target.
We’re fans of the design. The GameStick consists of two parts; the stick itself, which contains the electronics, and a wireless Bluetooth gamepad. There’s also a USB mains adaptor in the box, along with a USB splitter cable which can power both the stick and charge the gamepad. When you’re not using the GameStick you can store the stick in a slot in the top of the gamepad, but there’s no way to store the cables neatly.
The controller itself is reasonable. It follows the current controller style of twin analogue sticks, a directional pad and four face buttons, but you only get twin shoulder buttons and no triggers. It certainly can’t match an Xbox 360 controller for accuracy and finesse, but is generally fine for the casual Android titles the GameStick is designed to play; apart from in Shadowgun, where we found it very tricky to aim.
The setup interface takes you through getting your GameStick on a wireless network, and you’ll then need to use a PC to register with the service. The GameStick interface is easy to use on a TV, with a clean tiled interface and plenty of onscreen prompts for navigation controls.
The GameStick is pretty useless without a wireless connection
The meat of the interface is the game section. This makes it simple to browse games, see screenshots, watch gameplay videos and purchase titles. The games will then download over Wi-Fi. Strangely, unlike on an Android phone, the games don’t download and install at once; you have to download first and then manually click install, which is irritating for some of the bigger titles.
There will be 85 titles available between now and mid-November, all optimised to work with a gamepad. Our review model had 32 titles available, but we weren’t blown away by the selection. Titles designed to use a phone’s accelerometer, such as Riptide GP, feel unresponsive when you switch to the more instant inputs of a joystick. The GameStick also feels underpowered in 3D games; its Mali 400 graphics chip has been around a while, and Shadowgun is noticeably jerky.
Before you buy a game, you can view a selection of screenshots and a gameplay video
By far the most fun titles were a port of early 90s vertically-scrolling shooter Raiden, and hipster Double Dragon clone Fist of Awesome. The rest showed off the problems facing anyone launching an Android console; the range of titles is very poor indeed. The games are so casual as to be tedious, and shoddy controls and limited gameplay are far more noticeable when you’re playing on a TV with a gamepad than when you’re catching five minutes’ gameplay at the bus stop. Mobile phone graphics also show their limitations when stretched to fill a Full HD screen; they end up falling somewhere between an N64 and an original PlayStation for detail.
There will be around 85 titles available at launch and shortly after
The GameStick will also work as a media player. The media player application will play music and video files from a microSD card or USB flash drive plugged into the USB Y-cable, and if you want to stream files over a network from a UPnP server there’s a port of the popular XBMC media center application installed.
We could play our test files, both locally and streamed from a PC running Windows Media Player and a NAS, but encountered some problems. The applications didn’t letterbox widescreen films, so the aspect ratio was wrong, and audio tracks stuttered. We hope GameStick will fix these problems soon.
The GameStick is lovingly designed and has a well-resolved interface, but it’s stymied by the sheer lack of quality games available for Android. We’d love to sideload emulators on to the device and get busy with some retro console and Amiga action, but this isn’t officially supported so we’d have to wait for some enterprising hackers to do their work.
The cost of the device is also a problem. If you want to play Android games and already have a phone, you could just buy a £30 Moga Pocket Controller instead. We think you’d have far more fun, though, if you found another £50 and bought an Xbox 360 Slim from www.very.co.uk – the games available on Xbox Live Arcade are vastly superior to anything on Android.
| Details | |
|---|---|
| Price | £80 |
| Rating | *** |
