OUYA: I Want To Like It, I Really Do.

Like 64,000+ others I bought into the OUYA dream, both figuratively and literally. Its initial announcement had me skeptical as I really couldn’t foresee any reason as to why I’d want one, but it quickly grew on me and I thought, at worst, I’ve bought myself a media extender that I can use pretty much anywhere. I dropped a decent amount of coin on it, enough to net me a console and 2 controllers, and then patiently waited for that box to show up on my doorstep. I was excited to review it, since it was a new piece of hardware that I helped to create, and I was told I’d get my hands on it long before it hit retail shelves.

I got mine the same day it hit retail shelves in the USA and that was only the beginnings of my frustration with it.

The device itself was well packaged however the additional controller was just kind of dumped in the shipping box along with the additional batteries to power it. After peeling over the various protective covers that seemed to coat every single part of it I wired it up to my television and turned it on. It emphatically shouted “OUYA” at me and then asked for my wireless credentials to hook itself up to the Internet. This was all fine however it seemed to randomly drop the connection every so often, requiring me to sift through the menus to make it rediscover the connection again. This is with the router being only 3m away from it with nothing but air between it and none of my other wireless devices seemed to share the same problems.

Singing up for an account was pretty standard and after that I greeted with a few menu options. I hit play figuring there’d be a couple titles installed just to get you going (there aren’t) and after that I hit up the Discover section (which I guess counts as the shop) where I perused around for some titles. All of the lists that adorned the front page contained a similar mix of games which made them rather useless for discovery so I ended up looking for some titles that I remember being advertised as coming to the platform. After getting a couple recommended titles and all the emulators I could find I sat down to play through a couple of the games and I can’t say I was terribly impressed.

There’s clearly 2 classes of games on the OUYA store currently. The first is the truly free software which if its a utility seems to work great (all the emulators function as expected, but more on them in a bit) and the second is the essentially the free trial version of the game. Now I knew that there would be paid titles on there however I figured they’d be like the Android store, I.E. I’d have to pay to get them. That’s not the case for the titles that I got my hands on as pretty much all of them have the upsell as part of the game or hide behind tricky mechanics like “coins” or other kinds of micro-transactiony malarkey. I can’t say that this endeared any of the games to me but then again if I was a developer I’d probably do the same thing to get more eyeballs on my product.

Probably the saving grace of the OUYA is that the emulators do work since the OUYA has enough grunt to power them however the process to get them working could not be more of a pain in the ass. If you follow any of the guides that come up when you Google “get ROMs on OUYA” you’ll likely end up having to trounce through the settings menu looking for downloaded files so you can side load file manager onto it. If you’re really unlucky (like I was) the APK files will refuse to install which means you’ve got no way to manage the files. Thankfully the USB driver seems to work well enough to recognize thumb drives and read the files directly off them. This is where integration with the Play store would really come in handy as I could just skirt that whole process and use the web interface to deploy files to it. I do understand why they’re not doing that, however.

As you can guess I’m pretty underwhelmed with the whole experience and I’m going to level most of the blame squarely at the OUYA itself. We didn’t get off to a great start when I, someone who was an early backer, got mine when it went generally available. The whole experience after that point was just marred with little issues that just cemented that feeling of displeasure. Sure there are some redeemable things about the platform but honestly it’s nothing more than what I could get with a $6 app and hooking up my PlayStation 3 controllers to my Android phone.