TechRadar rating
/5
For
- Good price
- Decent build quality
Against
- Awkward controller
- Some odd UI foibles
- Needs more, deeper games
- Fairly low specs
The latest Android console doesn't get the formula right
Ouya was arguably the thing that put Android games consoles in our collective minds, causing a frenzy that resulted in the likes of Mad Catz M.O.J.O, Nvidia Shield and the GameStick here.All these consoles have their own little variations of the theme, and the GameStick's party trick is that it's a stick that plays games.
Well, there's nothing wrong with a descriptive name. The GameStick consists of a wireless controller, with a slot in the top that holds a removable HDMI dongle – that's the game console part. Like Google's Chromecast, it's just an HDMI port sticking out of a small plastic rectangle.
Pop it in the back of your TV and it's connected, or take it out and slot it into the controller to take away with you.
It comes with a couple of USB cables in the box (one for charging the controller, one for powering the console), a mains adapter for USB plugs, and a short HDMI extender, in case you can't fit the GameStick in the space behind your TV or AV box. The USB cable intended for the console is 1.5m long, which is a bit short for our liking, but it has a Y connector with an extra female USB port, so you can charge the controller and power the console from the one mains connection.
The GameStick itself is a nice little design, if simple. It's just a solid square of plastic, with plenty of holes in the casing to let the heat from its ARM system-on-a-chip out.
Specs
The ARM chip in question is an Amlogic 8726-MX, combining dual ARM Cortex A9 cores with an ARM Mali 400 GPU. What does that mean in real life? In theory, it's competitive with the Nvidia Tegra 3 found in the Ouya, which is fine for a lot of mobile games. But in a larger context, consider this point: both of these chips are less powerful than the iPad 3. Not the iPad 4, which was much more powerful than the 3. Not the iPad Air, which is much more powerful again. The iPad 3.You get 8GB of built-in storage, but only 3GB of it is available for storing games. However, there's a microSD card slot for adding more space that you can move games to (or play media from).
It's just a massive slab, with no concession to the shape of the human hand at all, except that the buttons are positioned nearish to where your thumb goes. It's as wide as an Xbox 360 controller, but doesn't taper in at the top like Microsoft's does (or the PS3 controller, or any comfortable controller ever), so it's just wide all the way up. It's not curved either, with a flat front, back and sides – as if the NES controller was the peak of hardware design.
For most people to reach all of the buttons comfortably will just mean holding it a little differently to most pads, and it's still perfectly usable – it's just less comfortable than others. And unlike the Ouya, you can't just use any Bluetooth controller you like – it has to be official GameStick controllers.
On the other hand, the analogue sticks are good. They're massive, looking almost comical, but they're made of grippy rubber with a good-sized ridge, and offer enough resistance to feel like you're moving them with precision.
Interface
Turning the GameStick on for the first time and activating it is an annoying experience, requiring you to manually adjust how it displays to fit your screen properly (which some games will also then do as well – where is the simplicity of consoles?), then input your Wi-Fi password using an on-screen keyboard that infuriatingly moves your cursor to the bottom corner when you switch to symbols/numbers.Once you're online, it gives you an activation code that you then have to trot off to your computer to input, and sign up for your GameStick account, which was also a poor experience – the mandatory date-of-birth fields couldn't be scrolled, so we had to say we were eight years old, but it then let us choose our age restriction for games as 17+ without question.
The first thing you'll want to do is find some games, though, and it's off to an imperfect start there. There's a Featured section, a Popular section, and an All section. And that's it – no narrowing down to free games, no genre options. Oh, and the Featured section was empty throughout our time with the console.
Once you find a game, you can buy it with money in your GameStick wallet (that you don't connect it straight to a credit card feeds into the overall feeling we get that PlayJam considers the GameStick as aimed at kids), or grab it immediately if it's free, and download it (which it can do in the background).
For some reason, games don't install once you download them – you have to do that manually afterwards. Actually, we think we know the reason why: this process totally locks the GameStick up. Installing ShadowGun took three minutes, during which the console was totally unresponsive. We played a few games on our iPad while we waited. Mostly the same ones you can get on GameStick.
But with GameStick, that confidence needs help to build. We don't advocate that all games should be free or anything, but when you have no idea how well these games will run, or how well the controls convert (many will be known to gamers as phone/tablet games, after all), we think a universal trial option would be helpful – or that developers consider including this themselves, using in-app purchases for the full game. We're not criticising the GameStick for this so much as just pointing it out, though – you might consider a lack of free games/trials a problem, or you might be happy paying. The games cost between £2 and £5 each, generally.
Game quality
Verdict
About Unknown
0 comentarii:
Post a Comment