3 Ways to Make Your OUYA Suck Less
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/10/13 at 01:40 PM CT
Depending on where you look, you might find that the OUYA Indie console is experiencing incredibly light sales that contrast drastically with its overwhelming Kickstarter support, or it’s selling so well that Amazon has sold out of them. Either way, if you’re a new OUYA owner, whether a Kickstarter backer or a retail purchaser, you have probably found the upstart game platform to be… lacking in many areas. After spending a month futzing around with my OUYA, I have gathered a few pieces of sage advice that I want to share with other frustrated OUYA owners in order to make the Indie console experience as non-horrible as possible.
1. Tip the OUYA onto its side.
Having problems getting your OUYA to connect to your wi-fi? Find that the controller lags to the point of unplayability after just a few minutes? What I initially assumed was a firmware issue, then a controller issue, then a battery issue (it seemed that the OUYA controller would stop lagging for 15 minutes on a …
Nintendo Direct 8/7/2013 - Wii U Titles
Nick - wrote on 08/07/13 at 03:24 PM CT
Nintendo Direct is a "new online home for exclusive Nintendo news - broadcast directly to you, the player". Does this mean Nintendo is actually coming out with new Wii U games? Well, they still claim to be... but are they crying wolf? I think instead of having a new means of announcing news, they should simply get their butts in gear and release some games! Here is a breakdown of the current announcements.
Sonic Lost WorldThis game is expected to be released October 22nd, 2013. The game itself doesn't look at that interesting, and why it is taking so long to come out I have no idea. The multi-player aspect of any Sonic game has never been very good, it is more designed to enjoy some fast paced action for about 20 hours of your life before you get bored with it. This game also comes out on the 3DS, and you can tie the two together for some sort of cooperative play. Let's face it, no one is going to do that. And if this is why it is taking so long to come out, that's pretty …
Backlog: The Embiggening - August, 2013
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 08/03/13 at 03:09 PM CT
Welcome to another look into the near future. As I predicted last month, the Steam Summer Sale did terrible, horrible things to my backlog. However, the damage wasn’t nearly as severe as I’d expected, considering that most of the great-looking Indie games on my Steam Wishlist (nearly 20 of them!) didn’t go on sale for more than 50% off. Anyone who understands Steam Sales knows you DON’T buy until the discount reaches at least 66%, but preferably 75%-80% off. I did add a few things to my backlog on the cheap, however: “D&D: Chronicles of Mystara” (not on sale, but the MJ crew really wanted to play it), “The Cave,” “RAGE,” “Deus Ex,” “Deus Ex: Invisible War,” “Deus Ex: Human Revolution,” “On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3,” “On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4,” “Fallout 3,” “Fallout: New Vegas,” “Krater,” “Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams,” “Ys I,” Ys II,” “Borderlands 2,” and a little bit of DLC for some …
Xbox: Done - Don't Be Fooled Again
Chris Kavan - wrote on 07/31/13 at 05:33 PM CT
As my friend George "Dubya" Bush so eloquently put it:
"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."
After having what has to be considered one of the most disastrous launch campaigns ever conceived, it seems Microsoft has done a complete 180 and taken out all that nasty stuff that pretty much everyone was complaining about: the always on requirement? Gone. The crippling DRM preventing trading and selling used games? Gone. The Kinect 2 watching you while you sleep? Now you can turn it off. Giving Indie Gamers the finger? Now they're invited back to the party.
What does this all mean? To me, nothing. For one, if Microsoft has that little issue in turning things around so quickly - it just means they could just as easily change their minds in the future. Hell, if they would have simply stuck to their original guns, I may have at least …
OUYA vs. Steam Greenlight: Clash of the Indies
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/26/13 at 06:21 PM CT
As my first impressions showed, after all the hype, I was not actually impressed with the OUYA Indie console – or its games – once I actually got some hands-on time with it. On the other hand, my love of Valve’s Steam gaming platform only continues to grow. Yet, when it comes to the distribution of independently developed games, both platforms seem to want to wear the crown.
While OUYA went the Kickstarter route of so many Indie games, turning itself into THE Indie Console, Steam’s endeavors to court Indie developers mainly revolve around a new section of their web services called “Greenlight,” which was launched in August 2012. After a scant year of existence, Steam Greenlight has found itself home to hundreds of candidate games and, at the time of writing, has ‘greenlit’ 125 of them for inclusion in Steam’s library once they are finished. Of those greenlit games, 47 have already been made available for sale.
Both OUYA and Steam Greenlight remove most of the …
The Steam Community Market: A Misstep or the Start of Something Good?
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/21/13 at 08:12 PM CT
Recently, Valve, the company behind the popular Steam PC gaming platform held an open beta test of a new Community Market feature built right into the Steam client. I didn’t pay much attention to this feature, as Gabe Newell’s statements about the motivation behind the creation of the Steam Community Market didn’t resound with me. A place for users sell each other insignificant virtual McGuffins? Pass! And, besides, with the well known lack of correspondence between “Valve Time” and any time-related mechanism in the real world should have meant that the Steam Community Market would possibly come out of beta In the Year 2525.
But Valve has exceeded expectations, yet again. After first releasing Steam Big Picture Mode within our lifetimes, they have also added the Steam Community Market, just in time for it to serve as a tie-in with this year’s Steam Summer Sale. So, what can one actually do with the Steam Community Market? Well, not a lot right now. In these early days, …
OUYA First Impressions – Part 2: The Software
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/14/13 at 07:05 PM CT
(Before continuing, please be sure to read the update addendum at the bottom of the first part of my OUYA first impressions.)
No game console is worth a damn without actual games to play on it. Many of the biggest failures in the Console Wars have learned this lesson the hard way. The OUYA strives to build its library of games both by catering to Indie developers in the hopes of landing some exclusives and by catering to OUYA owners by enabling them to try every game in the OUYA shop without paying a penny for the privilege. Indeed, the OUYA motto is, to paraphrase, “You shouldn’t have to pay for it unless you absolutely love it.” And with the years of Android game development standing behind them, the OUYA (theoretically) shows a lot of promise.
With the purchase of my OUYA, I was hoping to be able to play some of my favorite (read: ones I don’t absolutely despise) smartphone games on my TV: “Angry Birds,” “Fruit Ninja,” and “Jetpack Joyride,” along with my …
OUYA First Impressions – Part 1: The Hardware
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 07/07/13 at 01:38 PM CT
Ever since the Indie startup behind the OUYA console announced their project via Kickstarter, I’ve been intrigued. Not intrigued enough to actually back the project via Kickstarter and potentially end up with a fistful of vaporware to show for it, but intrigued enough to buy an OUYA on day one. Thanks to the American Independence Day holiday this past week, my OUYA took its sweet time getting to me from Amazon’s shipping warehouses, but it did actually manage to arrive two days earlier than anticipated. As of this writing, I have owned an OUYA for approximately 24 hours. In order to test out this all-digital, all-Indie console in the best possible environment, I took it to the MeltedJoystick HQ and connected it to the 30Mbps Internet available there. While I was able to get a good feel for the OUYA hardware in my single day of testing, the available software is still a bit of an unknown. So today I would like to share my first impressions of the OUYA console itself, with a …
Backlog: The Embiggening - July, 2013
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/28/13 at 02:01 PM CT
Welcome to another look into the near future. The Summer Game Drought should be upon us in full-force, yet there are still a significant number of games releasing in July. July is also the home of the annual Steam Summer Sale and its absurdly huge discounts. I’m expecting to add almost every game on my Steam Wish List to my backlog this month, even though most of them are old(ish).
But what about NEW games?
July will be foisting a mere two licensed trash games upon the populace, both based on animated Summer movies: One involves a mutant speed snail, and the other one involves the incarnation of Communism in the 1980s. On top of those two abominations, we are also getting a new annual release of a game based on the worst sport in the world... in college.
July isn’t looking like a significant month for non-shovelware multi-platform releases. In fact, there is only one: A new ‘Dynasty Warriors’ game. Does anyone really care about this series enough to justify the …
The Third Console Curse is Real
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 06/21/13 at 04:01 PM CT
There is a term in the scientific world called “multiple discovery.” This term refers to the concept that every scientific breakthrough is made simultaneously, or near-simultaneously, by multiple different individuals in completely distinct and unrelated locations.
Years ago, I thought I was quite clever in inventing a concept I called the “Third Console Curse.” Recently I discovered that others across the Internet had multiply discovered the same concept. Of course, in retrospect, coming up with the Third Console Curse didn’t really require any great feats of intellectual prowess, but merely the ability to observe and recognize simple patterns.
The premise behind the Third Console Curse is that every videogame hardware developer will completely and inexplicably fail on their third try, regardless of their success or failure on their first two tries. The observational datapoints that back up the existence of the Third Console Curse are the Nintendo 64, the Sega …
View Archive
