Ouya, just a little bit. Ouya, a little bit more.

Now I’m not an avid follower of kickstarter. Being someone with no money himself it’s easy to not be drawn into such endeavours. However whenever something catches the collective eye of the community, it’s usually something worth paying attention to. If you haven’t heard of Ouya by now, then get the fuck out from under your rock and start taking notes. Ouya is a fully fledged games console, with all the nuts and bolts, running Android and literally begging you to hack it and make some cool stuff for it. Sounds like it’d be an absolute flop, I probably would have agreed with you, but people want this thing, not just because of the hardware, but because of the message that comes with it, indie is good.

Let’s face it, the vast majority of the most innovative and creative games to have been released over the past two to three years have been indie games and games from smaller developers; the same time scale has also seen the rise of the free to play game, shaking up long established beliefs over the nature of the games consoles and big titles. Such innovation and adaptability, combined with a platform that encourages and supports it and who knows what would come of it... it’s like leaving a kid who’s got too much time on his hands with a copy of Minecraft.




Right, onto the specifics. This tiny box will have a Nvidia Tegra 3 quad core processor with 1GB of RAM, that’s more ram than the 360 I should point out. It’s got 8GB of internal storage, and hopefully a way of expanding that, either by utilising the USB port or built in wifi. It’s got a HDMI output supporting full 1080p, and Bluetooth, which one would assume is also the way the controllers connect, but leaves open the ability for your phone, computer and pretty much anything else to also connect to the main console. As of right now they say it’ll be running Android 4.0, but it would be fair to assume that after release it’ll be on a rolling update, keeping slightly behind the updates of the main Android platform. This makes Ouya more than capable to compete with the main consoles in their indie and casual markets, although don’t expect to see next gen graphics for £75 just yet.

The important thing to mention here is that it is running android, meaning that it’ll be perfectly happy to talk to your computer, your phone, your tablet, another console, the internet... and will be far more versatile in all those regards than current consoles. Imagine levelling up your character but then you’ve got to dash for whatever reason, easy, he’s already on your phone, keep playing the game on the bus. Imagining levelling up your character, and then having your friends all connect your phones to one console so you can continue the adventure in co-op. Or how about a game where all players share the information on screen, but they can use their phones, connected by bluetooth, to do some cloak and dagger activities out of view of the other players. And these are just the musings of a fairly boring individual, imagine what could happen when an idea enters the head of someone who knows what he’s doing. Now all these features are coming to consoles in one form or another, be it SmartGlass, the WiiU’s monstrosity of a controller, or the PS3 PSVita connectivity. However the whole point of Ouya is that it’s all already there, all native all open, ready to go, without having to buy anything extra... or a WiiU.

Now this wouldn’t usually get me excited, but I’d like to talk about the controller. There’s no other way to say it really, this thing is sexy. It’s like looking into an alternate reality where apple designed the 360. It looks sweet and more importantly it looks comfortable, judging by the video attached to their kickstarter it went through several iterations and prototypes to get the ergonomics just right. It is, if anything, that similarity to the 360 controller that has attracted the fire of many (albeit the most superficial) critics. True it is very reminiscent, but let’s be honest, the 360 controller is the Magnum opus of game controller ergonomics. In the same way that you can’t make anything more circular than a circle, if you want comfort, usability and durability, it’s not going to stray very far from what we already know.

What interests me more about the controller though, from a PC gamer perspective, is the fact that it’s an open standard, and it should be able to talk to a PC fairly easily. Now as a PC gamer I do play mostly with keyboard and mouse, sitting upright, but there are times when I want to pick up a controller, lean back in my chair and relax, often playing a more slowly paced game, or a console port, or any genre of game where I’m not at a disadvantage for using the controller. Now I get I could do this with the 360 or PS3 controllers, but there’s something this has over them, a touch sensitive pad in the center of the controller. This feature was added to let you play games developed for Android phones on Ouya, but lets face it when I’m chillaxing, the last thing I want to do is lean forward to grab the mouse just so I can answer Skype or perform another inane task. Such a tool could easily be utilised as a trackpad to do such things about as easily as you’d do them on a laptop, not to mention also be programmed to perform other functions within a game.

Now I’m not going to lie, while the hardware is impressive, it’s not going to be able to stand up to the big boys; but at the end of the day the openness is going to trump that. Those who are most adaptable will survive, and I guarantee you won’t get such dramas on Ouya such as the Fez and Silent Hill patch issues on the 360. While any good ideas WILL be snapped up by the bigger companies, this platform is where the true innovation would be crafted. So the only other thing I want to say between now and April is... please for the love of god don’t fuck this up!

 http://www.ouya.tv/

Jamie out xoxoxo