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.
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.
Useful platform, but really annoying in that regard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So, it's the new Wii?
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.
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?
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.
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.
For example, the recently released Sportsfriends (a collection of four local multiplayer games): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zh5EXf4rpo
If you have a PS4 and more than one other local person to play with occasionally you must be Sportsfriends right away!
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/
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.
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.
Haven't gamed with it, but perhaps i should after reading this.
edit: What people actually mean when they say " an AAA game" is "a game with a very large development budget"
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.
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.
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.
Hopefully the "an" is a typo and you don't actually pronounce AAA as saying the letter "A" three times. :)
