My Ouya review
Hi all,
Well seems like such a long time since I backed the Ouya's kickstarter campaign, infact it was all the way back in August of 2012. Since then I've been eagerly, and quietly awaiting it's arrival. Along with many other kickstarters, getting very frustrated over the past few months with their randomly sending out preorders before kickstarter units. Well this week it finally arrived, I'd backed enough to get the LE edition of the console, essentially the same as the retail one but just in a different colour, a pretty nice dark bronze colour (this one's not mine, just some picture I googled of an LE version)
The initial unboxing went well, the console is smaller than I expected it to be (plenty of images on google to help you judge the size of the thing), and the main console itself feels sturdy enough. The controller feels nice, solid and comfortable to hold, the batteries one each side of the controller, in the grip so helps balance and add some nice weight to it as well. It comes pre-packed with 2 Duracell AA's. The console also comes boxed with a HDMI cable.
The console itself seems very well built, nice and sturdy and despite it's small size has a nice weight to it. One very odd choice though is the positioning of some of the ports on the back of the unit, the connector for power seems at the top and everything else underneath it. I'd have assumed power connector would have been to the bottom and everything else that you may take in/out above that, just a minor niggle, just seems a little odd.
So when you first power it up, you get a little info on syncing the pads, which is harmless 4, just press a button on the pad and keep it pressed and it all synchs up. The pad itself, as I said earlier, feels really solid, but the problems start to appear when playing games. The dpad is pretty bad, feels like what an old megadrive pad felt like after 3 years of abuseThe trigger buttons work ok but feel really cheap, and occasionally the main buttons get stuck, that I can live with really, i'll put it down to being a new controller and after a few days use i'm sure they'll loosen up. The biggest issue is with the analogue controllers, there's not enough dead-zone so they may as well just be digital sticks (they are definitley analogue ones btw). Also I've had a few games now where the right analogue seems to get "stuck" so i keep moving when not touching the stick, very annoying.
Also the pad has a "touchpad" on it, but with the few apps I've tried it's a real struggle to use, very sensitive and not enough room for my huge fingers on the pad for it to be of any use.
Now the games themselves, there aren't that many currently available, granted it's not retail for another few days, but sure hope more and more stuff comes on there. The games I did try, i'll be honest are pretty awful. There was one interesting one, called polarity, which looked like a good, portal style first-person puzzler, but the controls were so bad (had major problems with the right analogue on that game) that it just put you off. There's some other wipeout wannabe game, but it's dreadful, choppy framerate, crap controls and for some reason music keeps dying... which brings me to another bug on the ouya, i notice that sometimes the sound will just drop, and I have to go into the settings screen and change any audio setting to bring it back, very annoying.
One other thing too, overscan, I run it on a 50" plasma, and have never had a device which has the same overscan problem that this has, a good 10% of the screen is missing, you go into settings and enable overscan override but it doesn't do a thing at all and all the other advice that screen offers is that you use fit/shrink etc mode on your tv instead, madness.
So on to the main reason I got one, emulation. So far I've tried a snes + n64 emulator on there. They are off the oyua store so were easy to test, and must say both worked handsomley, played mario 64, no issues, a few frame drops here and there but worked fine, same for snes games. So if emulation's your thing then this should keep you happy, the only issue is getting games onto the device is a bit of a pain tbh. I used ES File explorer, browsed my lan and copies files to the internal storage, but that was really fiddly.
It's possibly to side-load .apk files onto the device, bypassing the store completely but again, it's a bit too fiddly atm.
I'm sure a lot of these problems can be ironed out in software, some (like the pad) will have to wait until future hardware revisions I guess.
So is it a worthwhile purchase? Well if you can get it < £100 then yeah, XBMC is coming (you can run the android one anyway), and emulation is fun on it, the pad is pants, and all the other games on there too, so you need to decide what the priority is.
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Re: My Ouya review
I hope now.
When an official xbmc port comes out I may get it back out again if they support IR USB receivers and then could use the ouya as a replacement for my revo so I can get xbmc through my remote but also play the odd emul when I want a quick blast.
I control my XBMC client which is running on my Raspberry Pi using my Panasonic TV remote without a problem.
Originally Posted by _Belial
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