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The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

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Re: The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

#121

Post by dpcan »

sp332 wrote: post #55
dpcan wrote: post #44

My take-away from this article was that if every OUYA shipped with a $10-$25 gift card or starting account balance, people would get into it a lot easier, and not box it up after a week. 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…

Just a note, every game in the Ouya store has a free trial or some kind of free mode. You can download every game & start playing it right away, then choose to pay to unlock the rest of it later. Of course some games are completely free, but they're generally not very polished.

That's exactly the problem.

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.

Re: The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

#122

Post by KVFinn »

sp332 wrote: post #113
arrrg wrote: post #23

Local multiplayer is also coming back on other platforms, by the way. For example, the recently released Sportsfriends (a collection of four local multiplayer games): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zh5EXf4rpo

I'm excited about Sportsfriends, but is it really part of a trend?

Very much so. Oddly enough the largest quantity is on pc though.

Re: The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

#124

Post by rocky1138 »

lhnz wrote: post #7

The problem with calling it the perfect "party gaming" console is that it completely doesn't work for that when "it took me almost an hour to update the firmware and configure the 4 controllers." 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 eng…

It's worth noting that the most recent update includes the ability to skip a firmware update if you only want to play the games already on your system.

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.

Re: The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

#125

Post by rocky1138 »

baby wrote: post #120
Amarok wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I switched from windows to debian was not having to deal with windows-style updates: you can have the computer running and don't need to reboot after updating. I wonder if someone already thought of applying the same principle to consoles.

How is it that you don't need to reboot your computer to update with UNIX but you do have to reboot your computer quite often on Windows?

There are still a few instances where rebooting Linux after an update is a good idea. Kernel updates, for one.

Mostly, though, the applications and services in Linux can be restarted individually, making updates a non-reboot snap.

Re: The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

#126

Post by rocky1138 »

Rayne wrote: post #90

I probably would have actually enjoyed the Ouya, but it had such terrible input lag that it was effectively unplayable. Couldn't find any way to fix it, so it just sits on a shelf in my apartment now.

Mine suffered from the same. Two things fixed it:

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.

Re: The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

#127

Post by mwfunk »

__david__ wrote: post #108
YokoZar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A subscription you're particularly unlikely to get if you only use the thing every couple of weeks.

I don't know. I'm not a heavy user (I am in bursts, but not on average), and I'm happy to pay for PS+. I like the "free" games, it's introduced me to stuff I had never considered before that I really enjoyed. No, I don't think you need to be a heavy gamer to appreciate PS+.

Agreed. It pays for itself immediately. Anyone with a PS3, PS4, and/or Vita that doesn't have PS+ is objectively Doing It Wrong. Anyone who is such a non-gamer that there isn't a single game on PS+ that they might conceivably enjoy is such a non-gamer that their big mistake was buying a game console to begin with, not the fact that they did or did not get PS+. Seriously, it is that good of a deal.

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.

Re: The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

#128

Post by mwfunk »

everyone wrote: post #4

I wish people would stop using the term 'AAA' . Its meaningless imo as any other members from the implied scale (AAA, AAB, AAC, whatever) are never referred to. I find it one of the more annoying americanisms. edit: What people actually mean when they say " an AAA game" is "a game with a very large development budget"

"an AAA game"

Hopefully the "an" is a typo and you don't actually pronounce AAA as saying the letter "A" three times. :)

Re: The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

#129

Post by mwfunk »

ghshephard wrote: post #17
everyone wrote: post #4

I wish people would stop using the term 'AAA' . Its meaningless imo as any other members from the implied scale (AAA, AAB, AAC, whatever) are never referred to. I find it one of the more annoying americanisms. edit: What people actually mean when they say " an AAA game" is "a game with a very large development budget"

Fair enough, how would you like us to identify the tentpole games like Madden or Call of Duty, vs the smaller games that have less artwork, fewer levels, and limited professional voicing/bodywork?

Apparently he wants everyone to say "a game with a very large development budget" because "AAA" is some sort of Americanism and he doesn't approve of Americanisms. As a compromise measure, I would actually go along with this if the rest of the English-speaking world would let go of the term "maths".

Re: The shock of playing the Ouya, one year later

#130

Post by derefr »

georgemcbay wrote: post #109
baby wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a huge problem with new consoles I find. I don't remember having to update my N64 every time I wanted to play it. But my PS3? Every time I want to play I have to spend like 30 minutes in downloading and installing an update. Every single time. I don't play that often but still do play from times to times and I haven't had a clean launch for years.

Agreed completely. I joked that the U in "Wii U" stood for "update" because the amount of forced modal updates required to every part of the system was almost comical when the system was new. 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…

You'd think somebody would learn from Microsoft's long, hard struggle with Windows Update, and make consoles do the same thing Windows now does: download the update in the background at low priority while the console is on, then install it when you shut the console off. (And, for added effect, make the console actually look and sound like it has powered off while the updates are still installing. Windows 8 does this.)
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