For those who may have been following this website, I have an OUYA and posted about it being a Pandora’s Box of Awesome back in the day (a puff article far from my style these days), and I since hadn’t updated on it. In any case, with the news of Razer’s acquisition and subsequent dismantling of OUYA, I have a few not-so-new things to say about my OUYA and what I might do with it in the future.
This whole thing has actually gotten pretty bad on the game development side of things as indie devs are now panicking over this deal. OUYA promised a million dollar fund for them to make games through their Free the Games campaign that started 2 years ago, but the acquisition may have put a stop to that.
Which is worse, this or the Desura bankruptcy? (The latter was much quieter, for sure.)
What I Do with My OUYA
Not that much gaming, I’d say for sure. The games I do play with it are mostly on emulators. I’ve played a bit of Shadowgun, but that’s about it. Other than that, I’ve always been wanting to finally get through retro games with a “proper” setup.
Then again, it may be no good since I have an LED TV. If you really want to play games like Battletoads and other insanely difficult retro games, you may want to play with a CRT TV for the faster refresh rates that you may not feel with most slower and more relaxed games.
The controller that came with it was not as bad as it was criticized at first until the D-pad started to keep pressing right by itself. I’ve done my best to open it up and fix the damn thing, but it would still keep going right. I then bought the DroidMote server and clients app for my phone to control the OUYA and never used the controller again.
What I do regret is not buying an NVIDIA Shield for gaming instead and just get a media box for my TV. The Shield is portable, more powerful, and a hell of a lot more versatile than the PSP I recently got to play PSP and PS1 games. Meanwhile, the PS1 emulation on the OUYA is wonky and the Dreamcast emulator doesn’t work very well.
What this thing is now is a media box with extra features. I have a Seagate Central NAS with DLNA, which lets me use an app installed in the OUYA to watch videos on it, no complicated setups needed.
More Things to Do with My OUYA
I have yet to run MAME on this thing, as well as have multiple wired controllers. So I have to figure MAME out on Android, then actually get a powered USB hub. Perhaps that’s the only thing I need to do at the moment to get more use out of it.
With Razer having acquired the software side of OUYA but not the hardware side, this thing’s days may be numbered. I’ll have to find out if there’s a way to make it start up from scratch without having to log in to the OUYA servers, then I’ll be able to use this thing for at least 3 more years (hopefully until I fry it).
Other than that, I just want to turn it into an arcade box so I can say at the very least that I played games with it.
Conclusion
Was it a waste of money? Not really, but it surely didn’t fulfill its intended purpose as a gaming console. It’s too underpowered for most of the really good games, but at least its construction and Android platform made it somewhat versatile for other uses.
But nowadays, you can do roughly the same thing (or more) with a Raspberry Pi when it comes to customization. Maybe they didn’t think it all the way through when they came up with the idea, but at least it’s not a complete waste.
