The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later
wololo.net
wololo.net
I'm not saying that to hurt OUYA, I'm just saying that if they want to find this niche they should focus some effort on fixing that.
Edit: I'm not implying that other consoles are better fitted to this. I'm implying that engineering a console so that setup time is always fast even when you've not touched it for weeks could be a valuable feature in the "party gaming" market.
I bought the PS3 and Wii around the same time and obviously the "party console" prize went to the latter - particularly early on it seemed like every third time I put a game in there was 15 minutes of firmware and software updates.
$20 folks! There is no arguing there. I play my OUYA more than the GC but they are the two consoles I like the most and I have a ps3....
But everything that has come along since has had the glaring problems noted in this thread, such that I still have my Gamecube, the controllers, games, etc. It always works, when I need it to work.
Now if only Perfect Dark had been released for it...
Though not a party game as such I'd recommend buying Jungle Beat and a pair of bongo controllers if you do go down the Gamecube route.
The updates take long on any console though, so I wouldn't blame the Ouya, especially with its weak controller. The biggest problem Ouya has now is that it's competing with Xbox360 and the PS3 on price. You can used ones for around $100 to $150 and they have vast libraries of games.
I don't know if the XBox 360 would have the same problem if I bothered to hook it up to the internet. Frequently installing a new game requires a lengthy patch to the OS, but I don't get over-the-air updates so overall my XBox 360 experience is better.
Steam is running all the time when my computer is on (and I use my computer every day), and games just keep themselves up to date. For a given game that I'm trying to play, there's maybe a 15 minute period every couple of months when I wouldn't be able to launch it immediately.
The Windows updates aren't required in order to play games, and they can just be delayed until the next time you're restarting. Not a huge deal there.
For the console, btw.: all of them support nightly updates, so I rarely have the problem there.
The worst was when my Windows machine would restart itself in the middle of gaming to install updates, but luckily you can turn that off.
Also pc's are often left on/used for other things so the windows, steam and game updates all kinda just download and install in the background so when you go to play its usually just ready, unlike consoles where you turn it on and it then has to download/install everything as you wait to play.
Mostly, though, the applications and services in Linux can be restarted individually, making updates a non-reboot snap.
I now run linux mint on my gaming rig, so that's never a problem
This is possible to turn off in Windows, but requires fiddling with the registry.
I just realised that my original post wasn't clear - my computer RESTARTED in the middle of my game. Hence my frustration :).
Finally, anyone with a modern or semi-modern Sony console that refuses to pay for PS+ based on "the principle of the thing" needs to revisit their life choices and find vastly better principles to fight for (trust me, there is a limitless supply). Again, it's that good of a deal, and FFS it's only $50 people.
I've also got the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3 and PS4 and all are basically the same... if I haven't turned it on in a couple weeks it is nearly guaranteed I'll have to sit through a couple-hundred megabyte update or two (for the OS/firmware and probably whatever game I am playing too) and fritter away 10-15 minutes before I can do what I wanted to do in the first place.
Even the systems that try to make this less bad by downloading updates in the background while in low-power mode tend to be pretty clumsy about the whole thing, so even though the download part is already done for me I still probably have to sit through a 5+ minute 'install' (after agreeing to a EULA, and maybe a TOS change or two) requiring 2 restarts.
bleh.
I seriously hate that on my laptop. I want to switch off and be on my way and suddenly Windows tells me it needs to install an update before shutting off. Seriously wtf! This is the kind of things that drives me to Linux, where I know that when I click Shut down, the system will be off in 20 seconds.
I mean the chances of putting the laptop to sleep and having your laptop stolen by someone with enough knowledge to obtain access to the keys in RAM to decrypt the hard drive - well, that would be an amazing story! Not to mention the fact that you have data that would be worth all of that trouble!
What happens if the user unplugs in this state?
Useful platform, but really annoying in that regard.
While this might not have helped him here (his firmware sounded really old), they've already taken this sort of annoyance into account, and so at future get-togethers, even if there's an update, you'll just be able to go and play.
Most consoles ship with full games. If the OUYA is only shipping with free trials, they aren't really competing.
Side-note, the home page of their website, what are they thinking? It looks like a stop sign. Or a "come back later". I literally went to their site earlier this year and thought it wasn't live yet, didn't bother going any further - until today. Shoot, it might as be one of those giant red circles with a line through it saying "go away!"
You're right... this should be put in the 'bad ideas' portfolio for web design instructors to use in future lessons.
Even after you know that it is not a "come back later", it still feels wrong and awkward having to ignore your natural instincts to leave, as you look past the big red circles and explore the site!
Didn't think it was quite that bad - a red tinted smiley face.
What I did see $99 - made me assume that it was only available in USA. Turns out you can get it in UK/CA. UK price is ~$170.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/213775/Ouya_ditching_prob...
Just another ill-fated and ill-considered promise from the Ouya staffers. Unfortunate; I liked it on principle.
In an ideal world, 'all games have free trials' is good. The realities of game development mean that even for games where it's possible to build an excellent trial, it may not happen. Budget cuts happen, resources you thought you had go away, your schedule slips or deadlines draw closer - in those scenarios, it would be unreasonable to make the core game suffer in order to have a demo ready by the deadline. Most developers would instead focus on the most important part - the core game, the thing people are paying for.
There are also games for which it is near-impossible to build a free trial. A recent example is The Stanley Parable; the nature of the experience made it impossible to have a 'free trial' version of the game, so they had to instead build an entirely separate game that they then gave away for free, and tried to use to convince people to buy the actual game.
That solution worked great for them, but it took time and resources. I wouldn't be able to bring myself to tell every developer they had to do that just to be on my store.
Note that demos and trials are great when they work: They help convert slight interest into sales. However, many successful games sell entirely on the strength of good reviews, word of mouth, and press coverage. This is part of why sometimes the wisest choice is not to have a demo.
I'm thinking of the scenario mentioned in the article where the owner tried it once and put it away. If he had tried a couple demo games that first day by himself, then came back to it months or a year later, then those games might no longer allow the trial.
I think a great thing would be based more on total game time. You get 8 hours of in-game time to try this, then you must pay. Then another factor could be "the trial resets after 30, 60, 90 days".
As long as these are options the developer can pick and tweak, that would be great. It would also be good for the developer (though maybe not for privacy) if the Ouya could report game play stats (avg times opened per day/week/month, avg time played per session, users that "max out" their trial vs those that "abandon" the game).
Developers kept telling us that requiring a free component was discouraging them from publishing.
Since we changed our stance on that issue we've received a large influx of new and awesome games. So while it might not seem ideal from a gamer's perspective at first, the availability of a lot more games is pretty nice.
As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, the technical and design challenges of offering a working subset of a game as a demo can be quite high for a small developer. Even AAA studios can't always justify the cost.
When I bought the Wii U for my kids, if they got to the end of the new Super Mario world and I had to go pay $N.NN to unlock the rest I'd have a really bad taste in my mouth.
What about at least including a couple awesome titles with the console? They are all around $1 to $10 (ish) right? Heck you could include 4 A-list titles where I only get ONE with a major console.
Just saying... nobody is blinded by the "free to try" idea. All that means is that I will need to spend MORE money before it's fun.
It's a shame enough people didn't realise this from the start, but $150 is not a lot of outlay for what I got in return and when the games eventually move on to Ouya 2, I will just put XBMC on it and it's still a great device.
While modern $99 "video pucks" like AppleTV, Roku, or Amazon are good streaming clients for NetFlix, etc, they utterly suck at playing files from a local network. Ouya + XMBC is an incredibly option for this use case, now that Boxee is gone.
Hard to beat at $35, or $29 at Best Buy right now due to a sale. That's practically sales tax on the AppleTV plus the more or less required AppleCare.
And if you're inclined to tinker, the Chromecast is a ton of fun: it's actually running a full browser engine, and you can send it a page to view. That page can then use things like WebRTC streaming.
1. Communal browsing of content - you sometimes want to browse available content on the big screen so everyone can join in. That means menus and UIs on the TV not the device
2. Controls with physical buttons have two advantages. A well-designed remote is much easier to learn and use without needing to look at it. Secondly - games controlled via a touchscreen when you're actually looking at the TV are a fairly unpleasant experience.
I do want a smart TV with a physical controller. I also want Chromecast/Airplay etc. Different beasts.
I played a few minutes of Minion Rush on the Amazon Fire TV. It had some laggy moments, certainly not the gaming experience that they claimed it would be.
This is simply not true. Plex has been available on the Roku for years. It's one of the most popular channels.
I bought a Chromecast for $40 and the Plex iPad app for $5 and can now sit at the tv, controlled by the iPad, and stream content from my HDD flawlessly.
So, it's the new Wii?
This is not a failure of those games, this is a failure of the person who owns the game to not be a dickhead.
Street Fighter 4, for example, has handicapping. You can tilt the game wildly in the novice's favor, to the point where if they land a few lucky hits they win.
I've never played FIFA, but I'd be surprised if it didn't have some way to skew the balance of the game in favor of the novice.
This may be a cultural thing? In Go, handicap is a normal part of the game and everybody (but see below) is fine with using it. In Chess, people seem to detest handicap and insist on even game.
I live in South Korea, and I visited US Go club when I travelled there, and I was extremely surprised to find that some Go players there insisted on even game. Why would they do that? I mean, if you normally need 4 stones handicap in Go, you have exactly zero chance to win without handicap. What fun is that?
But! Handicap is common enough in Go that there is opening theory for handicapped games! This may not apply to Chess directly, but my point is that if handicap is a normal part of the game, you will have opening theory for handicapped games. This is kind of obvious if you think about it.
I suspect it's a psychological function of valuing absolute victory over valuing progress in your abilities, and which of the two you consider more important - and while this is entirely subjective, I feel like Go plays better to the latter set of values and Chess to the former.
Back in the day, some friends and i used to play a lot of Goldeneye on the N64. Like, a lot. We used to turn our health down to minimum to make it more exciting - a single hit with almost any weapon would kill you.
Sometimes, one of my friends' girlfriend was around, and we wanted her to join in. But she wasn't a gamer, much less a Goldeneye hotshot like us. So we gave her a handicap - she got maximum health, loads more than you'd get even in a normal game, and she played as Oddjob, who is half the size of any other character, and so harder to hit.
This still left game play a bit imbalanced; she could soak up huge amounts of damage, but wasn't aware or accurate enough to really take part in the highly mobile cut and thrust of deathmatch. So we played 3 vs 1, with our fragile ninjas darting around her indestructible, lumbering tank, desperately trying to get enough shots on target to take her down, while she spewed various flavours of death from her tiny bowler-hatted form. We called it Hunt the Freak, and we'd ham it up with an over-the-top commentary about the horrifying scenes of destruction wrought by the unstoppable Freak. All four of us found it highly entertaining, and often hysterically funny. It was so good, we ended up playing it even when she wasn't around.
He's right, these games are meant to be played by people with about the same experience, or at least a decent amount of experience and then a bit of handicap.
They're not exactly Mario Party.
That's why Diddy Kong Racing was such a massive success. The truly good party racing game for the N64.
For example, the recently released Sportsfriends (a collection of four local multiplayer games): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zh5EXf4rpo
If you have a PS4 and more than one other local person to play with occasionally you must be Sportsfriends right away!
In the meantime, I recommend Duck Game. A new 4-player 2D combat game that just launched exclusively on ouya: https://www.ouya.tv/game/DUCK-GAME/
I probably should have posted this early but I've been working on a library/framework for making party games with lots more than 4 players.
Players use their smartphone as the controller but all look at the same TV to play the games.
I've only had a couple of "larger" sessions so far but have had 17 player space wars and 14 player bomberman like. Going to try for 30 to 40 players in a few days.
1) Flipping the unit on its side so that the power button is facing me and the wires stick up in the air. Apparently the original run units had a metal base which affected signal from the antenna.
2) Switching the Bluetooth controllers to get the priority no matter if there's a game downloading or not. This feature/option was included in a recent update and you can find it in the Controllers->Settings menu.
I have a chocolate brown Kickstarter-backer model and I no longer get controller lag.
Haven't gamed with it, but perhaps i should after reading this.
edit: What people actually mean when they say " an AAA game" is "a game with a very large development budget"
The terms supposed meaning is about various aspects of game quality and also implying some kind of scale. But it is commonly used in a very vague way to denote "game with very large budget" or "game from huge publishing house" Things which have nothing to do with quality and are vague to the point of meaninglessness.
I doubt you'll find many instances of "AAA" in press releases either. It's an industry term, not intended for the general public.
1. Graphics & Sound
2. Controls
3. Gameplay
So the game would get a magazine review rating of A,A,A (top in each). Hence, AAA.
Remember, it was coined at a time when those three factors were significant to a gaming experience. Not so much now, but still relevant enough.
I can't recall a gaming magazine that used a grading scale as described.
Similar ambiguity exists around "hardcore" which means roughly the intersection of gamers who seek out challenging games, gamers who play competitively online, and gamers who enjoy adult content like sex and violence.
Hopefully the "an" is a typo and you don't actually pronounce AAA as saying the letter "A" three times. :)