Review: Ouya Game Console

The Ouya, the cheap little games machine produced by a company of the same name, turns out to be great for one thing: little games.

Despite launching only weeks ago, the $100, Android-powered games console already boasts over 200 games, some great, many bad. All of them are weird, and the best games are the silliest ones.

In Amazing Frog, you're a very clumsy frog who gets points for hurting himself spectacularly. The Little Crane That Could is a way-too-fun construction vehicle simulation game. No Brakes Valet is a game about attempting (and failing) to park high-speed vehicles.

If you've got an Ouya, all of these games are free to download and try out, at least for a limited time. Some games allow you to pay to unlock full versions, but many are just plain free. Of course, the sleek little system is sporting an nVidia Tegra 3 processor and only 1 GB of RAM, so these free games aren't like the big-budget cinematic games you'll find on other consoles.

The Ouya is not actually a viable competitor to the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 or Wii U, and everyone rushing to compare the devices is misguided. The Ouya is more like a toy, a rad-yet-affordable hobbyist device. If Sony's next big thing is a 747, the Ouya is a top-of-the-line, gee-whiz R/C plane.There are Ouya owners out there who will tell you that the best games on the system are Shadowgun and Ravensword. The former is a by-the-numbers space shooter with (admittedly) pretty Unreal Engine-powered visuals, and the latter is a fantasy action game which is almost as uninspired as it is broken. Both are budget versions of objectively better games – Gears of War and Skyrim, respectively.

These are ports of smartphone games that wanted desperately to be console games, and now that they've made it to a TV-based system, it's clear that they work well as neither. Yet a significant portion of Ouya Kickstarter backers hold to these as being closest to the type of games they want to play.

This isn't an audience with bad taste, per say, but with specific taste. They want big-budget Calls of Duty and Scrolls of Elder. They're not interested in all the bizarre, pixelated indie games that the Ouya is actually best suited to host. The Ouya is, simply put, not for them.

The reason for this, of course, is that the Ouya is not actually a viable competitor to the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 or Wii U, and everyone rushing to compare the devices is misguided.

The Ouya is more like a toy, a rad-yet-affordable hobbyist device. If Sony's next big thing is a 747, the Ouya is a top-of-the-line, gee-whiz R/C plane.

Ouya's marketing team hasn't yet figured this out for themselves. In a since-deleted tweet, the official Ouya Twitter account sarcastically referenced the Xbox One's $500 price tag in comparison to the Ouya's $100 price, a move that didn't go over well with customers.

Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman has, from the beginning, stuck to the line that consumers will want both an Ouya and one of the competing consoles, but so far hasn't successfully made the case for what the Ouya can do that others can't.

Certainly, the Ouya is the only big-name TV games machine capable of running games from other companies' consoles, thanks to the magic of emulation. That rascally official Ouya Twitter account recently provoked controversy when it was used to endorse the use of pirated games on the system, although that was merely public acknowledgment of something that has been obvious from the start: the Ouya, with its endless emulators and 1080p support, will enjoy a very lucrative relationship with pirates and nostalgic copyright dodgers.

Anyone following the Ouya's development will have heard rumors that its controller is not quite up to par, and I won't deny that it doesn't feel as good as the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 controllers. Fortunately, since nearly every game on the system natively supports third-party controllers like ones for the 360 and PS3, that doesn't matter.

This will come back to bite the Ouya people if they're hoping to sell many of their $50 extra controllers, because the best way to play Ouya games is with Sony's stick, available for only $40.

The Ouya storefront is designed to encourage users to download dozens of games at once. In various sections, its curators highlight bestsellers, feature new releases, and host genre-specific "playlists" like ones for couch multiplayer games.

If you see something that looks interesting, it can be added to your download queue with two short button presses. It doesn't matter if a game is bad, because it was free to download anyway, and within five seconds you can delete it and move on to another one.

The current review process for games is a bit strange. Ouya tests games to make sure they aren't broken, and then tosses them into a section of the storefront called the Sandbox. Here, adventurous gamers can try out titles and give "thumbs up" to the ones they like. If a game gets enough opposable appendages thrown its way, it makes it out of the Sandbox and into the store proper.

Already, this is not scaling well. In only a few days, Super Hexagon creator Terry Cavanagh ported 10 of his strange, experimental games to the console, and they've all sat in the Sandbox ever since. There's no clear policy on what happens to games that never make it out of the Sandbox, so it seems destined to become forever clogged with hasty ports.

Most of the issues plaguing Ouya today, like this one, are software-related. Controllers don't reliably connect. There are bizarre sound bugs. Occasionally the system seems to lose connection with the television and the screen goes black.

These are small issues, and if by Christmastime Ouya has gotten its act together and solved them, this machine will be an almost irresistible stocking-stuffer. Maybe just not for everybody.

WIRED Cheap and fun. Great software lineup. Excellent support of superior third-party controllers. Buying (and deleting) games is easy.

TIRED Software glitches galore. Sandbox area of the storefront is a weird no man's land. Desperately needs an SD card slot.

Disclosure: Ryan Rigney is the designer of FAST FAST LASER LASER*, a game recently ported to the Ouya.*