Gadgetory

hey guys this is Austin and today I'm here with the new 2014 Booya as this little guy aren't despondent on your TV take a look around and you'll see not much has changed on the surface the Ouya is still small enough to fit in the palm of your hand and it's got a simple nice-looking design it's entirely made of plastic which might not quite match the feel of an Xbox or Playstation but then again it's not trying to match the prices either this refresh model is sporting an all new black color scheme with a light-up Booya logo on top to serve as the power button around back or all the ports you might need including power n Ethernet micro USB HDMI for connecting your TV and a full size USB 2.0 port for connecting an external drive inside the new UI is sporting 16 gigs of storage a nice improvement over the eight gigs in the last model the specs themselves are still decent if nothing spectacular powering the console is a quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3 clocked at 1.6 gigahertz one gigabyte of RAM along with the standard stuff like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth if that sounds familiar that's probably because the Lea has similar specs to devices like the HTC One X as well as the original Nexus 7 now since it's based on Android that's not really an issue however typically don't expect any kind of insane graphics added this little guy it does have a fan which occasionally spins up but it's not bad it's still quieter than a typical console what feels very similar to a console is the controller which got a lot of criticism when the Ouya first came out this latest version tweaks a lot of subtle things that add up to be a pretty decent game pad at first the shape of the controller feels bizarre and not all that comfortable but it's something I got used to quickly the stakes are nice and tight as well not quite perfect but they're weighted nicely and have good motion the d-pad is also solid however the triggers and shoulder buttons still feel a bit cheap it's powered by a pair of double-a batteries that are hidden inside the grips which while it works it's a bit of a pain to deal with fire up the Ouya and you'll see the UI has evolved in the last year or so since the first console started shipping play is where your games are housed and it works fine however once you start getting a few things installed it can get cluttered quickly there's a decent selection of games but a huge chunk are directly from the Play Store which is hardly the best play the world for triple-a gaming there are a few legitimately fun games like bomb squad which has you fighting off waves of enemies on a platform along with dub Wars which is a twin stick shooter that syncs your weapons up with the music these are great ways of showing off with the Ouya is capable of but they're few and far between there still aren't any killer apps for the micro console just yet on the flipside a lot of games like shooters that I can never quite get behind with touch controls work really nicely once you have a physical controller Shadowgun is probably the best example of the graphical horsepower inside the Ouya it looks and sounds great the biggest draw for a lot of people though are going to be the emulators just like an Android phone you can load up classic games from both systems including the Nintendo 64 game boy bands NES and more performance isn't a major issue with most of the games I tried and the good d-pad on the controller was a huge helping games like pokemon emerald occasionally I ran into a couple minor issues but for the most part I can see using the Ouya purely as an emulator something they've really tried to hype with the Ouya is that all games are free to try if not outright free and while that definitely sounds good on paper it's not quite that simple when you first register your account you have to give them either a credit card or a prepaid Lea card that's not too uncommon but when you're playing a free game sometimes you'll run into a nagging you to buy the full version since it has your card it's as simple as clicking the wrong button and you've just bought the full game for the most part the interface is pretty polished but every once in a while you'll see a standard Android menu pop up which just looks out of place or if you need to jump into the settings you'll see it's entirely unchanged from what you would find on your phone at $129 the new Lea has seen important upgrades on both the software and hardware side for emulators and a few Android games it's nice same thing if you want an XBMC box but for the most part the Ouya just isn't quite a full-fledged console just yet what do you guys think though would you pick up a new Lea let me know in the comments below anyway thank you guys so much for watching and I will catch you in the next one