Playing A Game Ouya

Alright, so: last year, I pledged for a Kickstarter Limited Edition Ouya, with four controllers, each etched with my Ouya username. On Friday - four days before the retail release date - I received a non-limited edition Ouya with only one, un-etched, controller; essentially equivalent to the product that will be on retail shelves come Tuesday. Actually, since the controller I received still has the latency and button-stick issues that were fixed for retail units, retail buyers will get an all-around better deal than this.

I've submitted a support ticket regarding my obviously-wrong shipment, but there hasn't been any response yet.

So my opinion of Ouya's distribution and fulfillment is about as low as possible. With that bar set, let's take a look at the system itself.

First off, I have to give props for the mini-console's design and construction. The form factor is tiny, with just enough space to plug in power, HDMI, Ethernet, a USB device, and a micro-USB cable (more on these inputs in a bit). It's dead silent, and the power light isn't so bright that it'll keep anyone awake at night. The numeric specs are excellent, at least in theory, with current-enough video hardware and a hefty - for the price - amount of onboard storage for downloaded games and software. The little box is impressively solid, yet surprisingly user-serviceable. So, great job on that front.

That said: the controller is bad. Not the worst game controller in history, but certainly worse than current-gen console controllers, and definitely not worth the $50 that they'll be going for at retail. What do I mean by "bad?" Well, aside from the early-production flaws I've already mentioned:

  • Putting the batteries under the left and right faceplates - in fact, having removable faceplates at all - is a dumb idea. There's no rational explanation for this. It would have been far more sensible to just use a covered compartment in the back of the controller, like almost every other piece of battery-powered electronics known to man; instead, the faceplate magnets must strike a balance between "too hard to remove by accident" and "easy enough to remove on purpose," with the result satisfying the former but not the latter. It's a completely unnecessary inconvenience.
  • The rear (analog) shoulder buttons feel incredibly cheap, like the plastic covers could snap under moderate pressure, and the springs supporting them might fly loose at any moment. On my controller, even the left and right shoulders have different levels of resistance.
  • The d-pad is awful. It doesn't feel as "loose" as the Xbox 360's, but you're just as likely to hit the wrong direction on the Ouya's d-pad, because it simply isn't constructed right: the whole pad can be pressed down independently of a directional button. There's no solid axis to move your thumb around.
  • And the controller shape, as a whole, just doesn't feel right. The handle portions on the left and right side are wide and oblong, rather than circular, as with any other modern controller; and the shoulder corners are angled rather than rounded. So actually gripping the controller with your fingers, on both the top and bottom, isn't comfortable at all.

If Ouya was my baby, I would have outsourced the controller design and manufacuring to a Logitech, or a Mad Catz, or what have you -- to anyone who had any idea how to make a controller. Because whoever designed this one, clearly didn't. And it's no more technically complex than current game controllers: it has the same number of buttons and the same level of analog input as Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers, and uses plain-jane Bluetooth for wireless communication. This really shouldn't have been that hard.

Alright. Now what happens when you turn the Ouya on? Well, the first problem is the built-in wi-fi, which is absolute garbage. I'm far from the only one who's noticed this -- my personal experience was an initial failure to connect, then success when downloading the initial system software update, then another failure after the console rebooted. I was counting on using a wired connection anyway, and that works just fine, but be warned: if you're expecting to use your Ouya wirelessly, you might have to change that expectation.

The system-setup process as a whole is a bit rough. The parts where you have to make some kind of input - such as signing in with your username and password - work well enough from an Android application standpoint, but aren't really made for a controller. If you don't have any experience using a current (as in Jelly Bean) Android device, managing this part of the UI will probably be pretty confusing for you.

Once you get past that, you'll be in the Ouya interface, which is immediately friendlier than stock Android but more than a little obtuse. The main menu has four options: "Play," "Discover," "Make," and "Manage." The first thing you'll probably want to do is Play, but since you haven't downloaded any games yet, you can't; you have to Discover them first. (The system UI will assist you in this transition, but the terminology still strikes me as unintuitive.)

The Discover screen acts as the Ouya's storefront, and the most direct comparison I can think of is the Nintendo 3DS eShop, because both are equally arbitrary and unhelpful. Ouya's Discover page consists of rows of curated categories, like "Featured" or "Made for Ouya" or "Developer X's Playlist," each row consisting of an arbitrary number of items, with of course some overlap between rows. Further down the page are genre categories that you can browse through, but with eccentric genres like "Short on Time?" and "Fight!" this isn't a great content guide either. Finally, if you know what you want, you can use a search function and just type in a name -- not exactly what I'd classify as Discover, but it works.

I've tried eight free/demo games, based on the recommendations of the Discover page and of some other sources on the web - so, the cream of the crop, as far as I know - and here are my thoughts on each of them. Spoiler alert: I didn't play any of these games for more than a few minutes.

A Bit of a Fist of Awesome (a demo for "Fist of Awesome"): Playing as a lumberjack who punches deer and bears, there is a certain amount of quaint charm to this one. But the gameplay is incredibly shallow, and the faintly-humorous setting is completely offset by agonizingly slow movement and progress. The production quality is mediocre at best, except for the sound effects, which are actually painful to listen to.

The Bard's Tale (a port of the 2004 InXile adventure/RPG): I want to make sure the previous parenthetical statement is clear -- this isn't a remake, or even an "enhanced" port. This is a game from 2004, and it looks and plays like it. I could be wrong, but I think some of the assets were actually downsampled for mobile distribution; the intro cinematic looks lower-res than an iPod Nano. And, as an older game, it doesn't have the amount of respect for the player's time that modern games do. I force-quit after about three minutes of the "Beer, Beer, Beer" song.

ChronoBlade: While not an Ouya-exclusive, Ouya is supposed to be a lead platform for this sci-fi beat-em-up, which is why it's so distressing that the game runs like total shit on here. It's hard to get past the deplorable framerate, but if you do, you'll see a rather rote and unengaging button-masher. Of course it doesn't help that the game has no real intro or tutorial, so it's up to you to figure out which buttons to mash.

Flashout 3D: Really reminds me of Extreme-G, in the sense that the course is long and boring, and the AI isn't designed to form a pack -- so after the race begins, seeing your opponents again is a true rarity. There are a bunch of item pickups that ... I'm not really sure what they do. Since your racer accelerates automatically, all you have to (or can) do is steer and turbo-boost. It's just, really, really dull.

No Brakes Valet: No tutorial, no explanation. The game just started. So, I guess I'm supposed to steer this car into a parking spot? And it decelerates by itself? How the hell does this work? -- Whatever, not interesting enough to care.

Polarity: Although styled after Portal and its ilk, Polarity totally misses the point, which is to be fun, at all. You'll pick up blocks to activate widgets, and switch colors (red/blue) to either pass through or interact with similarly-colored environmental objects. But those mechanics are the only things happening here: there's no narrative, and there isn't any art. If I had cared enough to get past the first few rooms, I might have found that - according to web reviews - it's also extremely short. So, cool tech demo.

Saturday Morning RPG: This is the most fleshed-out game I tried, but still of a pretty low quality overall. The game's visual style, where characters are 2D sprites in a 3D polygon world, doesn't really work; the sprites aren't billboarded, they're just flat objects, and when the camera pans around them, characters will disappear into line segments. The combat gameplay is a mish-mash of simple, touchscreen-appropriate gimmicks, but other than a power-charge move, there's no depth in any of it. (There are also some real-time combat features, ala Mario & Luigi, but the Ouya controller's latency ruins them.) And while the writing has its moments - like a wizard who wears a Power Glove and uses the 1980's form of the word "bad" - most of it is workaday exposition to fill in an uninspired story.

The Ball: Yeah, the first-person puzzler that served as one of the earliest UDK releases. The PC release was pretty "Meh" on its own, but the Ouya version has ... dramatically down-rezzed textures! I know the Ouya is based on a mobile chipset, but that doesn't mean you have to use mobile-quailty art assets. Seriously -- on a TV screen, this just looks horrendous. And yet somehow, it's still a 725 MB download (compared to 10-100 MB for the other games I tried). Oh, also, The Ball doesn't take advantage of analog control stick input, so nudging the stick even a little bit makes you beeline in a cardinal direction.

As an additional note, all of these games had unexpectedly long load times, leading me to believe that the system's flash memory is cheap and slow.

Last year, I praised the Ouya model of requiring a demo or free version of uploaded games, as a great means of enticing people into the online store. Now, it seems like an absolute necessity for the console to get any use at all, because I can't imagine spending any amount of money on any of the games currently available. Will the store's offerings suddenly explode for the Tuesday retail launch, with new and exciting games, or at least something beyond "cheap port" or "tech demo?" I guess it's possible. But I'm not betting on it.

But my game experience isn't the end of my story, because even if I never use my Ouya for gaming, it's still got one trick left up its sleeve: a media center client. So I plugged the Ouya into my PC using the USB micro port, used the Android SDK tools to install the Android version of XBMC, eventually found the app under the Ouya's "Make" menu (since the Ouya UI was designed under the assumption that side-loaded software is a game you're developing), and ran it like any normal Android app. And XBMC works pretty well on the Ouya, so, that's cool. The current Android version of Netflix apparently doesn't work so great here, but an Ouya version is supposed to be coming eventually.

I still believe in the Ouya idea, and the product has in fact delivered on a few of its promises: specifically, a user-centric software experience, and a developer-friendly ecosystem with no exorbitant devkit costs. But it falls too short on too many others: certain key hardware specs (wi-fi and flash storage) are insufficient, the controller is terrible, the system UI isn't polished enough, the storefront doesn't solve the iTunes Store problem of software discovery, and the early-availability games - at least, the "best" ones I could find - are of a universally low quality.

If this system has ultimately succeeded at anything, it's being a $100 Android-powered media center -- which, to be fair, is still pretty nice. I dunno what I'm going to do with those four controllers, though. If I ever get the other three.

Rating: Bad