The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

http://wololo.net/2014/05/16/the-shock-of-playing-the-ouya-one-year-later/

by dumpsterkid • 12 years ago

321 157 12 years ago

This is exactly how I feel about my Ouya. It sits on the side of my TV stand completely unobtrusively, and if friends come over within 30 seconds we can be playing frantic, immersive games. Not desperately struggling to figure out how we get a second player online without a second xbox live account.

It's a shame enough people didn't realise this from the start, but $150 is not a lot of outlay for what I got in return and when the games eventually move on to Ouya 2, I will just put XBMC on it and it's still a great device.

billyhoffman2• 12 years ago

Yes. This. Ouya + XMBC is amazing.

While modern $99 "video pucks" like AppleTV, Roku, or Amazon are good streaming clients for NetFlix, etc, they utterly suck at playing files from a local network. Ouya + XMBC is an incredibly option for this use case, now that Boxee is gone.

drzaiusapelord• 12 years ago

I've been having a lot of success with the Chromecast lately. The more I think about it, the less I want an intelligent TV or yet another device (which needs updates and config) and controller (which needs its batteries replaced and fished out of the couch cushions) attached to it. A dumb receiver like the Chromecast seems to be the superior solution. I have no shortage of smart devices, I don't need another. I just need an easy wireless way to get whats on my smart devices onto my dumb TV.

Hard to beat at $35, or $29 at Best Buy right now due to a sale. That's practically sales tax on the AppleTV plus the more or less required AppleCare.

gonehome• 12 years ago

Roku paired with Plex works extremely well (thanks to Plex). Plex reminds me of VLC in how well it does exactly what I want it to do. I'm a fan.

https://plex.tv/

genericuser• 12 years ago

I've heard really good things about the Amazon Fire TV + XMBC (Gotham) from multiple sources at this point. Haven't tried it myself admittedly.

ripb• 12 years ago

While modern $99 "video pucks" like AppleTV, Roku, or Amazon are good streaming clients for NetFlix, etc, they utterly suck at playing files from a local network

I bought a Chromecast for $40 and the Plex iPad app for $5 and can now sit at the tv, controlled by the iPad, and stream content from my HDD flawlessly.

Florin_Andrei• 12 years ago

It sits on the side of my TV stand completely unobtrusively, and if friends come over within 30 seconds we can be playing frantic, immersive games.

So, it's the new Wii?

NicoJuicy• 12 years ago

I also bought an Ouya, but for some reason.. I only use it for Plex...

Haven't gamed with it, but perhaps i should after reading this.

everyone3• 12 years ago

I wish people would stop using the term 'AAA' . Its meaningless imo as any other members from the implied scale (AAA, AAB, AAC, whatever) are never referred to. I find it one of the more annoying americanisms.

edit: What people actually mean when they say " an AAA game" is "a game with a very large development budget"

cwyers2• 12 years ago

Oh, so it's apparently not meaningless, and not even confusing, as you were able to figure out its meaning right away.

vdaniuk• 12 years ago

Yeah, it is confusing, because "very large development budget" is extremely ambiguous.

everyone3• 12 years ago

No. Read this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_Gaming_industry

The terms supposed meaning is about various aspects of game quality and also implying some kind of scale. But it is commonly used in a very vague way to denote "game with very large budget" or "game from huge publishing house" Things which have nothing to do with quality and are vague to the point of meaninglessness.

bane• 12 years ago

As it turns out, "AAA" is shorter to say and type than "a game with a very large development budget", hence its common and semi-nonsensical usage.

dpeck• 12 years ago

Nitpicky, but generally the scale with something like that is AAA -> AA -> A

everyone3• 12 years ago

ok, but even that is never used. For instance no publisher ever announces the release of their new "AA" or "A" game.

brador• 12 years ago

It's supposed to be A each for:

1. Graphics & Sound

2. Controls

3. Gameplay

So the game would get a magazine review rating of A,A,A (top in each). Hence, AAA.

Remember, it was coined at a time when those three factors were significant to a gaming experience. Not so much now, but still relevant enough.

ghshephard• 12 years ago

Fair enough, how would you like us to identify the tentpole games like Madden or Call of Duty, vs the smaller games that have less artwork, fewer levels, and limited professional voicing/bodywork?

mwfunk3• 12 years ago

Apparently he wants everyone to say "a game with a very large development budget" because "AAA" is some sort of Americanism and he doesn't approve of Americanisms. As a compromise measure, I would actually go along with this if the rest of the English-speaking world would let go of the term "maths".

bitwize• 12 years ago

"AAA" is a marketroid term which means at least three things: a good game, a popular game, or a game with a large development and especially marketing budget. To the marketroid, each is coterminous with the other two.

Similar ambiguity exists around "hardcore" which means roughly the intersection of gamers who seek out challenging games, gamers who play competitively online, and gamers who enjoy adult content like sex and violence.

mwfunk3• 12 years ago

"an AAA game"

Hopefully the "an" is a typo and you don't actually pronounce AAA as saying the letter "A" three times. :)

bovermyer• 12 years ago

This article put the Ouya back on my radar. I'll have to look into it.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

I know this is exactly the opposite point the article is trying to make, but I'll wait until they're selling a version with a Denver CPU and a Maxwell GPU, before I even consider buying one. However, I'm not sure they'll survive that long. Maybe releasing one with Tegra K1 this year would sustain them a bit longer. I don't think you can even do 1080p games on OUYA, unless they are 2D. Maybe that's fine for kids or something, but not for me.

lhnz• 12 years ago

The problem with calling it the perfect "party gaming" console is that it completely doesn't work for that when "it took me almost an hour to update the firmware and configure the 4 controllers."

I'm not saying that to hurt OUYA, I'm just saying that if they want to find this niche they should focus some effort on fixing that.

Edit: I'm not implying that other consoles are better fitted to this. I'm implying that engineering a console so that setup time is always fast even when you've not touched it for weeks could be a valuable feature in the "party gaming" market.

Davertron• 12 years ago

It's not like you have to update it/configure controllers every time you turn it on. My Xbox often has to update prior to me being able to use it if I haven't played it for awhile too.

Xylakant2• 12 years ago

Well, if I let my PS3 in the box for about a year and then try to play a quick round of some casual game downloaded from the store, I'll have to go through the same ordeal. If it's used daily, then not. It's a function of how often you use your console.

nkozyra2• 12 years ago

I don't think anyone would argue the PS3 is the perfect party console, either.

I bought the PS3 and Wii around the same time and obviously the "party console" prize went to the latter - particularly early on it seemed like every third time I put a game in there was 15 minutes of firmware and software updates.

eloisant• 12 years ago

To be honest the Wii U launch day update was pretty bad. It took much more than one hour, and you'd brick your console if you powered it off thinking it was "stuck" during the update.

wfjackson• 12 years ago

He compares it only to the PlayStations but in my experience the Kinect with an Xbox makes it a pretty good party console. One day at work, we had everyone including 60+ year old women who never played a video game have fun with some of the Kinect motion games. I can't imagine the learning curve for them to even press a couple of buttons on a controller.

The updates take long on any console though, so I wouldn't blame the Ouya, especially with its weak controller. The biggest problem Ouya has now is that it's competing with Xbox360 and the PS3 on price. You can used ones for around $100 to $150 and they have vast libraries of games.

Tloewald• 12 years ago

My PS3 is kept up-to-date and despite this my typical experience launching a game I haven't played in a while or installing a new game is 30m-2h of patching with comically uninformative progress bars.

I don't know if the XBox 360 would have the same problem if I bothered to hook it up to the internet. Frequently installing a new game requires a lengthy patch to the OS, but I don't get over-the-air updates so overall my XBox 360 experience is better.

baby2• 12 years ago

This is a huge problem with new consoles I find. I don't remember having to update my N64 every time I wanted to play it. But my PS3? Every time I want to play I have to spend like 30 minutes in downloading and installing an update. Every single time. I don't play that often but still do play from times to times and I haven't had a clean launch for years.

rexf2• 12 years ago

I have the same problem with my gaming PC. When I boot it up, I have numerous updates for Windows, Steam, games, etc.

orky56• 12 years ago

AppleTV is pretty similar. My parents use it only when I come home about once a month. At that time, there's an update that needs to get installed. Now my parents have the impression that the AppleTV just takes that long to boot up every time. Hard to change people impressions after they've noticed a pattern.

AH4oFVbPT4f8• 12 years ago

The playstation 3 has a feature that will update the games over night, do you utilize this feature?

johnward• 12 years ago

This happens to me. I think I'll turn on the old console for a quick game. 30 minutes later it's still updating. Guess I'll go do something else then.

georgemcbay• 12 years ago

Agreed completely. I joked that the U in "Wii U" stood for "update" because the amount of forced modal updates required to every part of the system was almost comical when the system was new.

I've also got the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3 and PS4 and all are basically the same... if I haven't turned it on in a couple weeks it is nearly guaranteed I'll have to sit through a couple-hundred megabyte update or two (for the OS/firmware and probably whatever game I am playing too) and fritter away 10-15 minutes before I can do what I wanted to do in the first place.

Even the systems that try to make this less bad by downloading updates in the background while in low-power mode tend to be pretty clumsy about the whole thing, so even though the download part is already done for me I still probably have to sit through a 5+ minute 'install' (after agreeing to a EULA, and maybe a TOS change or two) requiring 2 restarts.

bleh.

nsxwolf• 12 years ago

This is why I don't play my 360 anymore. A few times a month, I find I have some time during a lunch break to play a game. My free time is completely consumed by a system update, then I turn off the console and go back to work.

nl• 12 years ago

This is a problem Samsung has replicated with their SmartTVs. Turn on SmartHub, and 30% of the time it insists on an update. Then randomly sometimes it updates in the background with a popup notification when it is done.

Useful platform, but really annoying in that regard.

ekianjo4• 12 years ago

I have the same (shitty) experience with the PS3 (a little less with the Xbox 360 and somehow updates seem faster on that one). This is basically pushing me away from consoles which were supposed to be "plug and play" in the first place. The best thing is just to put these consoles offlines so that you cannot technically update anything at all. Some newer games may complain about the need of a new firmware, though...

fit2rule• 12 years ago

It probably only took 1 hour to do it because he hadn't been doing updates in months and months .. I'm sure if the system was in solid, regulary (say: weekly) use then it wouldn't have been such an issue ..

rocky11383• 12 years ago

It's worth noting that the most recent update includes the ability to skip a firmware update if you only want to play the games already on your system.

While this might not have helped him here (his firmware sounded really old), they've already taken this sort of annoyance into account, and so at future get-togethers, even if there's an update, you'll just be able to go and play.

ebbv• 12 years ago

I have terrible memories of coming to a gamer’s place to spend the afternoon playing Fifa, Street Fighter 4, etc… in all these AAA titles, the guy who owns the game basically beats your ass so hard that all the fun is gone.

This is not a failure of those games, this is a failure of the person who owns the game to not be a dickhead.

Street Fighter 4, for example, has handicapping. You can tilt the game wildly in the novice's favor, to the point where if they land a few lucky hits they win.

I've never played FIFA, but I'd be surprised if it didn't have some way to skew the balance of the game in favor of the novice.

vertex-four• 12 years ago

I find games with friends to be substantially less fun when people have to be handicapped. When I win, it feels like it's because of the handicap, not because I did anything right.

sanxiyn2• 12 years ago

I find this phenomenon very interesting. I mean, obviously, you won because you did right things. You would have lost if you didn't. By definition, handicap should be set so that you have an even chance of winning.

This may be a cultural thing? In Go, handicap is a normal part of the game and everybody (but see below) is fine with using it. In Chess, people seem to detest handicap and insist on even game.

I live in South Korea, and I visited US Go club when I travelled there, and I was extremely surprised to find that some Go players there insisted on even game. Why would they do that? I mean, if you normally need 4 stones handicap in Go, you have exactly zero chance to win without handicap. What fun is that?

SahAssar• 12 years ago

This is why certain games hide the "handicap" from the users, such as mario kart. It has quite a lot of rubberbanding but since it's hidden and unnoticeable for most players they don't mind.

twic• 12 years ago

Generally, yes. But sometimes you can turn the handicap into something interesting.

Back in the day, some friends and i used to play a lot of Goldeneye on the N64. Like, a lot. We used to turn our health down to minimum to make it more exciting - a single hit with almost any weapon would kill you.

Sometimes, one of my friends' girlfriend was around, and we wanted her to join in. But she wasn't a gamer, much less a Goldeneye hotshot like us. So we gave her a handicap - she got maximum health, loads more than you'd get even in a normal game, and she played as Oddjob, who is half the size of any other character, and so harder to hit.

This still left game play a bit imbalanced; she could soak up huge amounts of damage, but wasn't aware or accurate enough to really take part in the highly mobile cut and thrust of deathmatch. So we played 3 vs 1, with our fragile ninjas darting around her indestructible, lumbering tank, desperately trying to get enough shots on target to take her down, while she spewed various flavours of death from her tiny bowler-hatted form. We called it Hunt the Freak, and we'd ham it up with an over-the-top commentary about the horrifying scenes of destruction wrought by the unstoppable Freak. All four of us found it highly entertaining, and often hysterically funny. It was so good, we ended up playing it even when she wasn't around.

prawks2• 12 years ago

The FIFA equivalent (which was how I learned the game with my roommate who was very good at it) is that the more skilled person picks a lower-ranked team and the new player gets their pick of any team. The difference in maneuverability between teams is enough to even most odds, at least after one or two games of getting used to the controls.

muyuu2• 12 years ago

Then they mash the buttons away and win almost half of the time.

He's right, these games are meant to be played by people with about the same experience, or at least a decent amount of experience and then a bit of handicap.

They're not exactly Mario Party.

ZeroGravitas2• 12 years ago

Talking of Mario, Mario Kart is famous for it's "rubber banding" where if you fall behind you are showered with powerups that can put you right back in the game, while those in the lead get less powerups and get targetted by the blue shell.

joshdance• 12 years ago

Disagree. There are certain games that you have to be 'good' at for it to be fun. My friends can't play Fifa. No matter how easy I am on them, or what team I pick, they just run around and shoot the ball every time. But they LOVE Hidden In Plain Sight. We have played it for hours.

lingoberry• 12 years ago

Very interesting, I'm surprised to see that Ouya is still alive. This is sort of what I want in a console today. I don't have time to play lengthy AAA games and prefer social games, but there are few alternatives for that type of gaming.

sp3328• 12 years ago

Ouya just had their retail launch last June. Less than a year would be fairly soon to pack it in.

ch0wn• 12 years ago

Wired Xbox 360 controllers work out of the box, as well. I feel like they missed an opportunity in promoting the compatibility more, especially as they got so much negative press about their controllers.

arrrg• 12 years ago

Local multiplayer is also coming back on other platforms, by the way.

For example, the recently released Sportsfriends (a collection of four local multiplayer games): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zh5EXf4rpo

nnnnni• 12 years ago

I really hope so. That's what has largely killed commercial video games for me...

sp3328• 12 years ago

I'm excited about Sportsfriends, but is it really part of a trend?

KVFinn2• 12 years ago

Very much so. Oddly enough the largest quantity is on pc though.

reidmain• 12 years ago

Towerfall is also on the PS4.

sp3328• 12 years ago

And the version on PS4, "Ascension", is better than the version available for Ouya right now. They say the Ouya version will eventually get the extra features. http://www.polygon.com/2013/11/16/5108514/is-towerfalls-move...

jonny_eh3• 12 years ago

Yup, in June.

In the meantime, I recommend Duck Game. A new 4-player 2D combat game that just launched exclusively on ouya: https://www.ouya.tv/game/DUCK-GAME/

raldi• 12 years ago

Is anyone else finding this article's pale-gray-on-white color scheme very difficult to read?

jsnell• 12 years ago

Yes, but that's color scheme of half the internet these days so you just have to deal with it :-/ I recommend this bookmarklet: https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html#zap_colors

danielweber• 12 years ago

I see no text at all, whatsoever, even if I highlight. Chrome on Windows.

dpcan2• 12 years ago

My take-away from this article was that if every OUYA shipped with a $10-$25 gift card or starting account balance, people would get into it a lot easier, and not box it up after a week.

Most consoles ship with full games. If the OUYA is only shipping with free trials, they aren't really competing.

Side-note, the home page of their website, what are they thinking? It looks like a stop sign. Or a "come back later". I literally went to their site earlier this year and thought it wasn't live yet, didn't bother going any further - until today. Shoot, it might as be one of those giant red circles with a line through it saying "go away!"

damon_c• 12 years ago

"the home page of their website, what are they thinking?"

You're right... this should be put in the 'bad ideas' portfolio for web design instructors to use in future lessons.

Even after you know that it is not a "come back later", it still feels wrong and awkward having to ignore your natural instincts to leave, as you look past the big red circles and explore the site!

pbhjpbhj• 12 years ago

You mean the http://ouya.tv website?

Didn't think it was quite that bad - a red tinted smiley face.

What I did see $99 - made me assume that it was only available in USA. Turns out you can get it in UK/CA. UK price is ~$170.

Pxtl2• 12 years ago

Point. At launch, the Nexus 7 included $25 of Play money.

sp3328• 12 years ago

Just a note, every game in the Ouya store has a free trial or some kind of free mode. You can download every game & start playing it right away, then choose to pay to unlock the rest of it later. Of course some games are completely free, but they're generally not very polished.

kevingadd2• 12 years ago

This may have been true at launch, but it is false now:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/213775/Ouya_ditching_prob...

Just another ill-fated and ill-considered promise from the Ouya staffers. Unfortunate; I liked it on principle.

dpcan2• 12 years ago

That's exactly the problem.

When I bought the Wii U for my kids, if they got to the end of the new Super Mario world and I had to go pay $N.NN to unlock the rest I'd have a really bad taste in my mouth.

What about at least including a couple awesome titles with the console? They are all around $1 to $10 (ish) right? Heck you could include 4 A-list titles where I only get ONE with a major console.

Just saying... nobody is blinded by the "free to try" idea. All that means is that I will need to spend MORE money before it's fun.

donw• 12 years ago

It's pretty much an example of everything to not do on a landing page.

nebulous1• 12 years ago

I just can't see the OUYA surviving the Fire TV

trustyhank• 12 years ago

A lot of his arguments (good party console, hardware doesnt always matter, etc) also apply to Nintendo consoles. Ive always loved the Wii for similar reasons (the fact that it is easy to softmod doesnt hurt either :P )

programminggeek• 12 years ago

The Ouya has some fun games and it's a cool little console. It's not even remotely perfect, but I'm glad it exists. Between Ouya, Kindle TV, and maybe someday Apple TV or other smart TV's, there's going to be a nice place to put fun little indie games in more places, which is good for developers.

sehugg• 12 years ago

These are all fun games, but the Ouya's problem is that these are all the same games the author would have been playing a year ago.

jonny_eh3• 12 years ago

That's mostly the fault of the author and our marketing budget. We've been getting a steady stream of awesome new games including Duck Game, which I'm sure would have been a hit at this guy's party: https://www.ouya.tv/game/DUCK-GAME/

notlisted• 12 years ago

Do not own an ouya, but I have been very pleasantly surprised by both performance of the device and quality of the games on my FireTV. Expect great things going forward.

Rayne• 12 years ago

I probably would have actually enjoyed the Ouya, but it had such terrible input lag that it was effectively unplayable. Couldn't find any way to fix it, so it just sits on a shelf in my apartment now.

Neff• 12 years ago

You may have some luck opening a support ticket[1]. I had the same issue and they sent me a shipping label to send the controllers in for a firmware update. I haven't turned the console on since I've gotten the controllers back, so I don't know if it fixed the issue but they claimed it would.

[1] https://support.ouya.tv/anonymous_requests/new

rocky11383• 12 years ago

Mine suffered from the same. Two things fixed it:

1) Flipping the unit on its side so that the power button is facing me and the wires stick up in the air. Apparently the original run units had a metal base which affected signal from the antenna.

2) Switching the Bluetooth controllers to get the priority no matter if there's a game downloading or not. This feature/option was included in a recent update and you can find it in the Controllers->Settings menu.

I have a chocolate brown Kickstarter-backer model and I no longer get controller lag.

dclowd9901• 12 years ago

Is this the same wololo who hacks Vitas and PSPs? If so, this guy's a legend in the handheld hacking community.

pomfpomfpomf3• 12 years ago

Yes.

KVFinn2• 12 years ago

The trend the author is seeing is not just on Ouya. 'Sportsfriends' on PS4 (and PC soon) has four unique games as good as any he played for local multiplayer. Towerfall is better on PS4. And many more like these the pipe! I heartily recommend Nidhogg when it comes out for PS4 later.

If you have a PS4 and more than one other local person to play with occasionally you must be Sportsfriends right away!

sp3328• 12 years ago

But the PS4 is $400, and makes a lot of heat. The Ouya is $100 + money for other controllers (which could be Ouya, PS3 or Xbox controllers). If you just want Towerfall and Nidhogg, the Ouya is a much better deal!

TruthSHIFT• 12 years ago

His favorite Ouya game, Hidden in Plain Site, is also available for Xbox 360 and it's totally excellent.

voltagex_• 12 years ago

Vote for it to come to Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=206372...

greggman• 12 years ago

I guess this is self promotion but it seems relevant.

I probably should have posted this early but I've been working on a library/framework for making party games with lots more than 4 players.

Players use their smartphone as the controller but all look at the same TV to play the games.

I've only had a couple of "larger" sessions so far but have had 17 player space wars and 14 player bomberman like. Going to try for 30 to 40 players in a few days.

http://greggman.github.io/HappyFunTimes/

The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

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