Should i back ouya

It has removable panels on either side, which hide the AA battery housing — when you open the box, the right panel is off and the whole thing looks broken, but that's just Ouya subtly letting you see the empty battery slot.

It actually needs two batteries, including one under the other panel — that took me longer to figure out. The removable panels are a cool touch — maybe you can 3D-print those too — but they're not made very well. The right panel is slightly askew from the controller itself, so the analog stick catches in the lip at the top; it also takes some work to get the magnetic seals properly seated, which you have to do, because otherwise the four buttons get caught underneath.

All the pieces don't fit together very tightly, either, which gives the whole controller a cheap, breakable feel. The analog sticks are the hardest part to get right, and Ouya nailed it — they're not too stiff or too loose, and flow perfectly with your finger.

The triggers are a little mushy, though, making me feel both like I had to mash them to get them to work and like they'd break every time I did so. The buttons made me angriest, though. I often had a moment to rue my mistake before anything happened, too, because there's a fair amount of lag between the controller and the console.

It wasn't always present, and seemed to have to rhyme or reason to it, but about half the time the game felt perfectly synced and the other half it felt a full beat behind what my thumb was doing. Like the PlayStation 4, the Ouya's controller has a trackpad in the center.

This is actually really useful on the device — it never really comes into play during a game Update : the trackpad is used during Saturday Morning RPG, and I'm told others are coming , but it's handy for navigating menus and switching between text boxes.

It's really just a Band-aid, though, vainly trying to cover up the mess that is the Ouya interface. Over the course of my time with the Ouya, I've wondered constantly why the product is launching now. This console isn't finished — it's not even close. The device runs Android 4. It's orange, gray, and blue, and is typography-based, simple, and vaguely reminiscent of the tiled Metro interface on the Xbox It's also basically just a home screen.

Every advanced settings menu is ripped clean from stock Android, and almost every pop-up menu or dialog box is pure Google as well. For one thing, it looks hideous, because, well, stock Android isn't designed to be on a TV.

That's kind of the whole point of Ouya. It's also just jarring, constantly giving you the idea that you've broken something or gone somewhere you're not allowed. I'm all for the idea of reskinning Android, and I even like the way Ouya's thinking about doing it for your television, but the company really needs to actually finish the job.

There are four menus on the home screen — Play, Discover, Make, and Manage — though you'll only really use two. Play is your game library, two rows of icons filling the bottom third of your screen — it's a nice-looking menu, but leaves a lot of unused space on your TV and requires a lot of sidescrolling if you have more than a dozen or so games. Since they're all free to play, I acquired a lot of games pretty quickly. I downloaded one just because "Organ Trail" sounded kind of like "Oregon Trail," and that made me laugh.

I've still never played it. There's no way to sort the menu: it's just oldest to newest from left to right. That means, of course, that you have to scroll through all your old games to get to your newest one, which makes exactly zero sense. Discover is where you go to find more games, through another series of submenus.

You can also sort by genres, or dig into the "Sandbox" — this is where games go before they hit a minimum threshold of popularity and jump into the sortable menus. Sandbox games should be treated with caution — some are great, but most are buggy alphas and betas. All the sorting is kind of overkill for now, since there are only or so games for the console, and you could look through them all in about ten minutes.

Make is for developers to track builds and apps they're working on, and it's also for some reason where the Ouya's browser resides. Manage is for settings, pairing new controllers, and the like — there aren't very many settings, even for things like video resolution, so you won't use either menu very often unless you're a developer, in which case, well, you'll probably use them more.

That these are the "featured" games on Ouya, the best and most popular on the console, is telling. The library of Ouya games currently consists mostly of relatively unknown indie games, many with a distinctly retro 8-bit feel that don't look good in p.

Don't get me wrong, some of the games are a lot of fun: I enjoyed pummeling of Piglas in Beast Boxing Turbo , and even though I can't figure out what in the world I'm supposed to do in The Ball , I still love aimlessly wandering through the game. But every gaming console or platform needs a halo game, whether it's something like Angry Birds or, well, Halo.

Ouya's best "exclusive" at the moment is Final Fantasy III , a game that came out in and is also available on a variety of other platforms. That doesn't count. Thing is, you could plug your Android phone or tablet into an HDMI cable and play a bunch of those games on your TV, often with a controller.

Shadowgun , Grand Theft Auto , Asphalt 7 , and a surprisingly large number of other high-quality games are available in the Play Store. But Ouya's going its own way with the Ouya Store, and it pales tremendously in comparison.

The company's teased a handful of partnerships , from XBMC to OnLive which would be a huge get , but there's no telling when all that is coming. For now, the only really compelling thing to play is old Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 games via the emulators that come in the Ouya Store, but hunting for ROMs and sideloading games isn't a particularly easy process either.

With Ouya's hacker ethos tends to come a distaste for paying for things, so Ouya has mandated that every game in its store be free to download. That sounds like a great, let's-all-hold-hands way to make gaming great on the platform, but it leads to something far more frustrating. Worst of all, it makes buying things impossibly easy — you enter a credit card when first setting up your Ouya, and there are often no confirmation boxes or checks against you spending thousands of dollars.

Oh, you hit Upgrade because it's right next to Play and the controller's laggy? Thanks for your money. Reconfiguring payment systems is one part of what's required for a developer to move their app from Android to Ouya. The other is hopefully simpler: apps have to work with the controller. This, as best I can tell, is the one compelling argument for Ouya's not including the Play Store or even the Amazon Appstore on the console — a number of existing games simply won't work with the controller, and even those that do don't work well.

Configuring a game for a controller is easy, though, so for Ouya's sake and ours I hope developers put in the time. Welcome to the silver lining. The light at the end of the tunnel, if you will, or whatever the name is for that moment when the parachute actually opens. The Ouya may not currently do much, but it's capable of an awful lot — and I've seen some of it in action.

I managed to get Netflix, Plex, Shadowgun , Mario Kart 64 , and Angry Birds Space all running on the Ouya, and even though the interfaces looked like they were meant for 4-inch screens rather than 60, at least they worked. Well, mostly: I could only play Shadowgun on Hard, for some reason, and with no touchscreen the pigs in Angry Birds stayed all too alive.

The Ouya is as hackable as promised. You can open up the console with an Allen wrench and four screws, and no corner of the OS is outside your reach. It's a remarkable developer plaything, a device with lots of potential and few true limitations.

But all the things you can do are things no normal user will ever figure out how to do. Here's how I sideloaded apps, a process I only figured out by accident after three days of fruitless Googling and searching through every inch of the Ouya's software: first, download an APK of a file manager. At this point I've already confused my parents, most of my friends, and frankly myself. Go to the Ouya's browser, go to that URL, and download the file. Seven years ago, Ouya was going to change the face of gaming.

Now it's dead. Razer, the company that bought Ouya back in , announced today that it will be discontinuing support for the gaming console. Owners of Ouya will have until June 25th to continue using the device. After that, Razer will be deactivating user accounts and shutting down all online elements of its service.

Gamers will only be able to play games they have downloaded directly to their console. The rather unceremonious shut down of Ouya isn't what its backers were expecting when they funded the project back in By promising a console that was affordable and easy to develop for, the creators of Ouya managed to generate a huge wave of support.

While Ouya did end up delivering a console, the final product couldn't live up to the hype. The controller felt cheap and was difficult to use and the console suffered from some performance issues that made games a pain to play at times.

Despite the open ethos that invited anyone to develop games for the console, there ended up being too few truly engaging games to keep people's interest.