Hello friend! Come, sit down for a spell and let me tell you a tale. A tale of hope and revolution.

Once upon a time, the video game industry was dominated by big name publishers selling big name games with big price tags on big systems. Only the rich and powerful companies could hope to create video games and nobody questioned this, it's simply the way things were and totally in line with our typical capitalistic view of industry.

Then along came Kickstarter.

Kickstarter introduced this fantastical concept of paying for things that interested you, BEFORE they were actually developed. All of a sudden the small businesses and hobbyists of the video game world had this fantastic outlet to say: "Hey! I've got this great idea! If you'll all just give me this much money, I can make this happen and you'll all get to enjoy it too!". In this time of innovation and change, the Ouya appeared to a willing audience ready to drink up it's promises of an open system set apart from the big corporate entities that up till now dominated the industry.

To this end, the Ouya delivered. Unfortunately, as we are beginning to discover, this world of independent development and opportunity for small titles isn't exactly the utopia we envisioned and the Ouya almost embodies the problems to be found in that scene as a whole.

But lets start at the top

Hardware wise, the Ouya has an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, 1 GB of ram, 1080p output through HDMI and 8 GB internal storage plus an SD card slot and/or external USB hard-drive. All in all, the Ouya shines here when you consider it's $100 price tag.

For those of you who are hardware illiterate, all of this translates to a system with superior stats to that of a Xbox 360 and some small measure of extendability normally only associated with a PC.

The controller however, is not so solid.

The buttons have a tendency to stick into the removable plastic covers (and on a brand new controller to boot!) the sticks feel sub-par, the shoulder triggers are fairly loose feeling and as a whole my hands just aren't happy holding the thing. To add insult to injury, the touch panel is really terrible.

However! All hope is not lost... Interestingly, I have managed to get my Mouse, Keyboard, 360 Controller, PS3 Controller and Wiimote all working with the Ouya, thanks to it's open USB port and standard Bluetooth connectivity. So there's that!

So hardware wise, the Ouya itself is pretty solid. It's also running an Android operating system which means that development is very open and most of those dumb fart soundboard apps you all have on your phone should work just fine on the Ouya.

Starting up the Ouya for the first time was fairly underwhelming. The UI design is OK? I guess. It was very minimalist in nature, which is a nice relief from the clutter and advertising of the Xbox dashboard or the settingtopia of the PS3. The problem is it's just not done WELL. Actually, that's mostly the problem with the Ouya as a whole. All of the features and experience elements you were expecting from the kickstarter project are there... It's just... Not done well enough that anything is impressive or (if I can be a little harsher) even competent. Little problems like the system volume being way louder than the app volume, oversizing of android elements that obviously were not designed for the big screen and lack of a notification system for things like download completion all add together to make the Ouya experience a little less refined than I would have hoped. Even for $100.

Basically, the Ouya home screen is 4 buttons: Play, Discover, Make and Manage.

• Manage is basically a shinier version of the settings page you see on most Android phones.
• Make is mostly developer tools and links to SDKs and such. This would imply that quite obviously the Ouya is designed from the ground up to be a developers console.
• Discover is essentially the "App Store". I put that in quotations because you don't actually BUY anything. Everything you download from here is free, though usually this means you're downloading a trial which asks you to purchase the full thing in-game. The Ouya, for better or worse, really is Free-To-Play heaven.
• Play is where you can see and launch every app that you've downloaded

A simple enough system, however I fear that it's minimalist nature is it's own Achilles heel because quite frankly you run out of things to do FAST. The Discover "store" only has a few dozen apps available and they are almost without exception all typical mobile games which for the most part probably are not hitting their ideal environment on the big screen.

Due to the limited amount of apps available, I was unable to put the Ouya's hardware to the test. Puddle THD ran flawlessly, as did the Nintendo DS emulator I installed but I really would have liked to try out Hawken (Which was not released with the Ouya as promised) or an equally graphics intensive game.

When the Ouya first launched its campaign, it took on a decidedly communist-propaganda style marketing scheme. "A Console by gamers for gamers!", "Join the Revolution!", and other such phrases were always to be found side by side with the Ouya. In fact, the communist fist even became a sort of unofficial symbol of the console. It's ironic then, that the Ouya, much like the Soviet Union of old, has gone from an idyllic Utopian vision of freedom and equality, to depressing shambles caused by economic realities. Without the money or the market, I fear the Ouya will never attract the talent it needs to fill it's discover store with interesting titles. It'll be like shopping for a decent game on a windows phone... Only worse!

The Ouya ended up being exactly what it intended to be and did it well. A big-screen android platform? Check. A great place for Independent developers to publish content? Check. An affordable console with a free selection of content? Mostly Check. It's a real shame then, that it turns out this dream was flawed from the start.

I spent $100 on the Ouya on the blind faith of it's promise. Everything in me wants to find ways to write about how I didn't just waste my money on idle promises...

But alas, I fear I can't do that.

Between a mediocre user experience, a sub-par controller and most importantly a devastating lack of interesting content, i'm afraid the Ouya gets a measly 2 stars on the official MRST (Mike Rating Scale of Truth).

Dosvedanya, gamer's utopia.

Good review! Sad to hear the Ouya doesn't live up to its promise but I can't say I'm particularly surprised by this. After owning an Android device I found it particularly lacking in interesting games which was my main worry for the Ouya with tepid support coming from developers.

I think everyone called it when we first heard about this thing.

Nice review.

I wanted the Ouya to be good, but eventually have to concede that, like the Nvidia Shield, I want it for the wrong reasons: a low cost and easily portable device that I can play SNES/Megadrive emulators on with decent controls. Could probably get that out of a Raspberry Pi if we're honest.

That review was pretty helpful. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Then why did the KS get so much money? =/

Thank you for being the only one that could give me a real world idea of how tiny this crazy thing is. I really hope that it has the potential to become something really cool but like you said the software will have to be there for that to happen, fingers crossed it becomes really interesting down the line, at least it already has an install base right?

great writeup, thanks.

designing and manufacturing a really good controller sounds to me like a massive undertaking. I'm not surprised it wasn't that good. It's such a critical part of a gaming system though.

and you know, Android, which means java developers, which let's face it, aren't really in their element unless their writing cryptic & crashy java web applets.

Because people bought the pie in the sky pitch?

So I just got mine, and yeh most of this is correct.

The controller is prreeetttyyy bad, has some weird lag at times as well. They somehow made the touchpad both too soft and far too sensative, it either goes not far enough or too far too fast.

The console itself isn't too bad but the software to support it is pretty terrible IMO, although FF3 runs smooth but then again it has the lookings of a high resolution PS1 game so take that for what it is. Technically the console isn't released yet so I do take the software support as launch titles so things could get better.

I'm still hoping that in 6-12 months they'll have worked out enough of the issues to make this a solid system.