Gamestick, an android game console so small it stashes in its own controller.

Gamestick is "the most portable TV games console ever created" — it's a HDMI dongle, the size of a large thumbdrive, that slots into its own bundled game controller when not in use. At $80, it'll be a must-buy for me; the kickstarter project aims for $100,000 in funding.

• [DrNick]

  It’s a joke. Stock photo’s with stock phrases about gaming being social that are completely unrelated to the product. The mock up photos make it look cute, but what need is it filling exactly?

  • [Tynam]

     Yep.  I backed the Phonejoy Play instead.  Now there’s a gadget I actually want.

• [Stooge]

  If you want to play Google Play games on your HDTV, why wait? You can pick up an identically specced UG007 stick and BT games controller for less than $80 today, and you’ll have enough left over to buy a chisel so you can knock a hole in the controller yourself.

  • [EvilSpirit]

    I’m suspicious that the same argument could have been used (and was used, as I recall) to dismiss the XBox as just a PC. And yet, here we are. Details matter in these things.

    • [fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

      The issue I have with these ‘Android-Stick-Kickstarter’ projects is not so much that they are ‘done already’; but that most of them seem to propose adding value in the wrong places.
      A few years back, the notion of a teeny computer with actual video out, for cheap, was actually reasonably exciting. Gumstix boards started north of $100, and were mostly serial or ethernet focused, even once you added another $50 in expansion bits. Now, though, DX, Ebay, and similar are infested with Android stick computers of various sorts. A bunch of pacific rim OEMs we’ve never heard of have pretty much done it to death. So, anybody who wants cash up front to produce some stick PC looks like they are a few years late.

      What hasn’t happened is any reasonable standardization/rationalization of the software side of things. Anonymous Chinese OEMs roll some pretty crap firmware and(while they don’t bother with crypto lockdown or anything) they also don’t bat an eye at changing hardware specs at any moment, which makes for a fractured and somewhat chaotic 3rd-party firmware scene(unlike, say, the cellphone world, where the OEM might hate your guts; but the hardware tends to be a known quantity).

      Yet another mystery droidstick isn’t worth very much. A middleman who buys and resells in sufficient quantity to provide a known set of hardware specs, and a stable base for decent firmware support, would be really nice.

• [teapot]

   ^What Fuzzy said.

  The thing most people don’t understand about these android/bt stick combos is that almost all android games have no bluetooth controller support. They are touch screen games and devs don’t care to design or write their games to work with bt controllers. A very slight number of native games are the exception, as well as pretty much any rom/emulator for any game platform. Roms are, imo, the reason you want a bt controller, but even then the game experience is dictated by how well the devs have simulated controller responsiveness in their emulator.

  Running Mario 64 on my Nexus 7 using a PS3 controller is quite a fun experience and a great way to relive the old games in a simple way.. but since I’ve got the N64 and cartridges still I don’t see the point in emulating the experience (especially considering the actual N64 controller responsiveness was better than through the emulator). It’s a bit of fun but these things are crap and will likely be crap for a fair while when compared to a console gaming experience.

  Anyone who said the Xbox or PS3 was/is just a PC are foolish. Yes, it’s got most of the same bits as a PC but it was designed specifically to play games and was always sold for a far cheaper price than a comparable gaming PC would have cost you. In a way this situation is analogous in that android is intended for a purpose (smart phone multitasking) while something for games would be designed significantly differently.

  PS my setup for N64 on Nexus 7 includes:
  *ROOTED Nexus7
  *Mupen N64 emulator https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=trev.android.mupen64plusae
  *Sixaxis controller app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dancingpixelstudios.sixaxiscontroller&hl=en
  *PS3 controller

• [atlouiedog]

  My Android phone has HDMI out and I’ve paired it with a PS3 controller. I could do this for the price of a cable. I don’t because the games that support controllers aren’t more attractive to me than what’s available on my 360/PS3/PC. I could see doing it if I traveled a lot and wanted to hook it up to a hotel TV. Otherwise, for the time being, I think these cheap Android devices are great for media and emulation, but not much else.