Good Morning Friends! This morning’s topic is going to go some places, and hopefully, you are along with me on this ride. I am very much a PC-focused gamer, but that does not mean that I don’t also spend a significant amount of time playing consoles like the Switch. Essentially PC will probably always be my platform of choice, but over the last few year when my wife determines it is time for sleep I have gone along with her. This means most of the time I am piddling around on either a phone, tablet, or my switch if it has sufficient charge until I reach the point where I am actually ready for sleep. This means I am always on the lookout for a novel use for one of these devices, especially if it allows me to continue having an experience similar to my gaming PC in a portable form factor.
This week the Ayn Odin went up on Indie GoGo and it is a device that I have been watching for some time as it went through R&D and development. The idea is to create an android based device with a comfortable form factor similar to the Nintendo Switch. The “Pro” version of the device is $265 and honestly seems like quite a deal, at least compared to the recent pricing of the Steam Deck. The thing is… I already have a way more competent android device that I use on a daily basis… my Razor Phone 2. For a few years now I have been chasing the concept of turning that into a more proper gaming device that includes some physical controls. The thing that really is the thing holding me back from completely embracing mobile gaming… is touch screen controls just feel like shit. I have giant fumbling fingers and they never offer the level of precision that I am seeing in a touch screen interface.
Since I have a Razor Phone, my first step on this journey was to pick up the Razor Kishi when it first landed on the market. Razor makes decent enough peripherals, and I have to admit the thumb sticks and buttons on the device feel solid. The first strike against the device however… is that it doesn’t fit their own phone. There are some rubber inserts on the sides of the device that are designed to create a firm grip when you dock your phone into it. However with the Razor Phone 2, it will not fit into the device unless I yank these two rubber bumpers out of the way. Without them in place however there are other problems that arise.
This image comes from Razor’s own marketing slides, and shows the back of the device. Essentially your phone is suspended between the two chonky sides of the device by an elastic band. Without the rubber bumpers in place that grip your device, the entire thing feels floppy in the hand. Given that I have nonsensically large hands that I have already discussed in the past, I am constantly causing the device to flex in unnatural ways given that it isn’t making great contact in the first place. While I have spent some time gaming in this manner, namely playing XCloud… it isn’t exactly an award winning experience.
Now we zoom forward to last week, as I was following news about the Ayn Odin device… I saw someone mentioning that it was just cheaper to get a burner phone and the device shown above and end up with the same results. The device in question is known as the Gamesir X2 and it comes in both a Type-C connection variant that I own and a Bluetooth connected version. I specifically went for the Type C model because it is powered by connecting to your phone, and allows for pass through charging of the device. There are a few things that I feel warrants discussion here. Firstly you notice that the sides of the device are completely flat, and not curved like that of the Kishi… which allows for you to support a fairly wide array of devices with this design.
The second bit which is significantly more important for me personally is the way that the device actually telescopes to fit the device. Instead of an elastic band, there is a sliding plastic bit that extends for most of the length of the device. The end result is that the majority of your device is supported and not just floating out there without a rigid structure. The extended portion is not flush, but in my personal experience with the controller it does not feel flexible like the Kishi did. Instead it feels more like I am holding a solid body handheld, which is ultimately the experience that I wanted. The negative of the Gamesir is the pricetag… which was originally $100 but has more recently fallen down to $60.
This is awesome if the games you want to play on Android natively support a controller. The challenge here is that most of them do not… which means you now have a rather expensive bauble that can’t really do what you want it to do. Genshin Impact for example fully supports a controller in the iOS platform but that feature has yet to trickle over to Android. Gamepad mappers have existed for quite some time but generally require you to root your device in order to get them to work… which triggers protection schemes that various mobile games have to stop cheating. Those that don’t have traditionally done something called Screen Cloning, which also shows up as “cheating” to various software scanning for such activity. For example if you try and use a popular app like Octopus while running Genshin, you are forced to log out .
Now is where things start to get super fiddly and Rube Goldberg device like. There is a piece of software called Mantis Gamepad that functions in a completely different manner. Essentially the only way to run a piece of software at a system level is either to root your device or to flip your device into developer mode. While in developer mode you can essentially debug software with low level permissions, which requires you to have some other device “Activate” it. This is done through something called the Android Debug Bridge or ADB, and if you are really curious you can see a description of how that works here. The above video explains how to get it up and running more specifically for Mantis Gamepad. The reality is that you have to either have access to a PC or access to another Android device in order to activate the Mantis app before it functions.
Once activated however you have a floating widget that now appears over games you launch from within the Mantis app. The buttons in the above screenshot shifted when I tried to pull up my screenshot app, but essentially you get a menu full of widgets that you can place over top of the controls on the screen. You also have the ability to assign “phases” and toggle between them so you could have one set of controls for action mode, and another set of controls for when you are in a dialog box for example. The final result was that for the first time ever, I could comfortably do my Genshin Impact dailies while sitting in bed using a controller with my phone. I tried a few different control schemes but ultimately felt more comfortable using face buttons for combat than I did triggers. This is probably just a me thing, given that the majority of my console years were spent playing Super Nintendo era games and not more modern titles where everything focuses on the triggers and bumpers.
I’ve tried a few other titles like Dragalia Lost and Tales of Wind and they worked perfectly fine as well. Now that I have a viable way to play android games, I am going to start branching out into emulation with this set up. Mostly I am making this post, just in case there is someone one there trying to do this same thing. I am going to start experimenting with Moonlight and Steamlink as well, and maybe even try some PlayStation Remote Play. I can already say however that using Microsoft XCloud feels awesome with this set up as well. I highly recommend the Gamesir, because so far it has come the close to giving me that Android Switch experience that I was looking for.
That was a very interesting read, thanks for this. I am still not convinced that controllers are ready for prime time on Android, but it sounds like progress is being made.
I still think the Game Boy Color is a better portable gaming device to my tastes than my phone. I just played all the way through Pokeomn Red (the original from the late 90s) and enjoyed the hell out of it. The Switch has also started to make it into my rotation, but I would never take mine on a trip.
Bel, you have inadvertently reminded me that the SouljaBoy Console was a thing. If you had just gotten one of those, you wouldn’t have to rube goldberg up a solution!
Not being one who has ever gravitated towards mobile gaming, I’m reading this and looking at images and thinking that MAYBE converting a phone into a more traditional hand-held would offer the feng shui my mind needs to actually try and stick with the kind of games that are found on mobile. Sad that a lot of them don’t seem to support external controllers like these, though.