Gadgetory

this is David with the verge and this is ouya or vo yeah whatever you call it it's an Android based gaming console that a lot of people have been waiting for back in July the company behind the device raised more than eight point five million dollars from more than 60,000 Kickstarter backers all of whom backed a super simple cheap hackable Android gaming console the Ouya device itself is a black and silver cube just under three inches on every side Ouya makes a big deal about how it is designed by yves behar but it's really not that interesting and design there's a glowing power button on the top and a handful of ports at the back but it mostly just looks like a futuristic Chinese food container it's fine looking and since it's so small it fits neatly into nooks and crannies of your home theater setup but it's not particularly remarkable same goes for the device's controller a slightly plasticky black and silver device that fits somewhere between a nice Xbox 360 controller and one of those cheap Universal controllers you'd buy for $20 at Best Buy it's a Bluetooth controller connects pretty easily and has plenty of buttons to analog 6 lots of triggers and bumpers and the standard diamond of color buttons that in this case spell booyah instead of a B X&Y the analog sticks feel great but the triggers are pretty mushy all in all it's just an average controller it's one really cool feature is the trackpad in the middle kind of like the PlayStation 4 switch you need at various points to Mouse around between menus and text boxes most games ignore it and I did occasionally hit it by accident and end up with a random mouse cursor in the middle of the screen but it also came in handy a bunch of different times it comes in handy mostly because E is software is kind of a mess it runs Android 4.1 inside the Chinese food container box is basically a smartphone with a Tegra 3 processor and a gig of ram plus his own TV friendly interface on top of it the interface looks nice it's really simple and definitely easy to use but it's really slow and kind of clumsy in places it's also only about half implemented so you often end up in an Android settings menu or a dialog box or switching between the Ouya and Android interfaces and that's really when you need the cursor who use interface is definitely on the right track here but it's not nearly finished it's like they designed a home screen and kind of left it at that actually that's kind of the whole story of Ouya right now the company makes a big deal out of being open and hackable and that's definitely true with a lot of effort we were able to sideload almost any app on the Ouya play with roms even get Netflix working but it took a lot of effort and that's way beyond what most normal people are going to do right now plus the games and apps that exist for the US tour right now see more like proof that this thing can play games than actually making it a viable gaming platform people should buy there are about a hundred games available but they're mostly simple mostly kind of retro and mostly pretty boring after about five minutes this device can run great games though we managed to get a version of Shadowgun running on the device and even though we could only play it on hard for some reason it worked great and it's one of androids most intense games but getting anything other than the US tour running is not for the faint of heart and even for developers there's some work to do to get their games running on the platform for one thing every game on eeeyah has to be free to download that's cool on one hand since you can try any game before buying it but it also means you're constantly being up sold and cajoled into buying full versions which is maybe worse than just paying upfront basically the Ouya is still just a developer device this $99 box has lots of potential and is certainly capable of doing some great things but unless you feel like spending hours of your time and dealing with some really shady legality when it comes to roms or side loading apps there's really not that much to do with it yet the company is planning to improve it constantly and it's gonna need to work fast if I were one of the 60,000 people who already spent $100 and are receiving a device now I'd be pretty mad the controller needs some refining the store needs a lot more games and hua desperately needs developers of all kinds to buy into the platform I don't know if or when any of those are going to happen but don't buy this until they do