In Defence of Ouya

Look beyond the hate and you may find a compelling experience.

By the time I received my Ouya the excitement and hopeful anticipation had well and truly worn off. The familiar cycle of doubt and gleeful degradation started early on this one, as initial hardware reviews citing controller build issues and a lacklustre games line-up lent water to the sea of negativity already swelling in the comments section of basically every Ouya-related article.
While many of those early complaints are merited (poor execution of a solid controller design means you’ll be using 360 or PS3 controllers with the system for now), the momentum behind all the months of pre-release tear-downs based partly on misunderstanding, bad communication and good old fashioned ignorance means the waves are still crashing and wiping out many of the voices discussing the unique and positive experiences Ouya might provide its audience.
I was originally interested in the system not for its hackability or potential as an illicit emulator box, but because of its promise to offer an open, anyone-can-publish marketplace within a format that’s currently lagging behind in delivering that kind of experience: the home console. I hoped for indie and retro-style game experiences that avoided many of the issues I have with iOS and PC gaming.

Ouya - it's tiny.

After a few weeks with the Ouya and dozens of hours of enjoyment, I’ve arrived at the position that despite the disdain thrown at it across blogs and games media sites, there’s more than enough potential here to justify the machine’s existence.
First let’s be clear that Ouya is not, contrary to popular misperception, a way to play mobile games on a television. While that unfortunate phrase “Android console” understandably brings to mind images of a box equivalent to a smartphone attached to a TV via MHL with a Bluetooth gamepad shoehorning in traditional controls where they don’t belong, the truth is Ouya is its own gaming platform with nothing to do with the Google Play store or existing touch-based Android games.  The Ouya interface doesn’t look or feel like Android, and the games, for the most part, don’t feel like smartphone games that were designed for touch controls.
That’s not to say there are no ports of mobile games on Ouya — the familiar architecture of the device would make ports a no-brainer for a lot of Android game developers — but they’re all running versions that fully support a home console environment.
Of particular importance in arguing in favour of Ouya, however, are the games that have wound up here because they suit a particular kind of play afforded by a television and a couch, but would have no hope of showing up on 360, PS3 or Wii U.
The void these games might fill in your gaming life sits somewhere between the pleasure you get from retro couch multiplayer and plumbing the depths of the internet in search of passion-project beta builds, underground sensations or intentionally janky physics-based game experiments.
Take BombSquad for example, a physics-based Smash Bros on a 3D plane where just pressing ‘punch’ does little damage but if you add the gravity and inertia of jumping from a step and rotating your body wildly, you can knock an opponent out in one hit. There are no pre-determined move combos or canned animations, just a few simple commands and power-ups and their application to physics and some great maps. BombSquad’s an example of a game that, like a lot of titles for Ouya, was always meant to be a couch multiplayer experience but released first on a platform that didn’t facilitate that (in this case on Mac and PC).

Frantic BombSquad multiplayer action.

Or take the celebrated Ouya exclusive Amazing Frog. The first thing you’ll do is attempt to move your frog, discover he’s near impossible to control properly, watch as he collides with the edge of a piece of environment and groan as he collapses into a slow-motion physics-driven heap from which he may refuse to recover.
Discovering exactly how difficult it is to do anything in this game — especially with a friend playing on a second controller — is possibly the most hilarious gameplay experience I’ve had all year, and successfully moving a soccer ball a short distance to the goal without breaking my frog’s neck or being collected by my brother’s frog catapulting at me from a nearby jumping castle was more satisfying than beating any contrived boss battle in recent memory.
Obviously the experiences available on the Ouya also run the gamut from obligatory Square Enix re-releases that are now five times removed from their source material, to apps like EMUya which contains a storefront for indie NES ROMs, to games like four-player pixelated arrow-fighting gem TowerFall which walks the line between niche and contemporary so carefully it’s not a stretch to imagine it showing up on Wii U or PS3.
Yet the best games on Ouya, like Amazing Frog, show us how much of the sheen we’re accustomed to can be stripped back without sacrificing a truly fun experience at the core. For as many incredible and essential experiences the ‘Hollywood’ era of the video game has brought us, it’s also set a standard for games needing to be marketable, needing to be relatable and communicable. Big console games are so expensive and so numerous that the non-game elements of visuals and soundtrack need to be appealing enough to sell the experience almost on their own.
If there’s a common kernel that all fun game experiences share — a playful application of a rule-set to a given space or situation — Amazing Frog and its kin remind us it operates separately and apart from the trimmings big game productions take as necessities.

Amazing Frog - an unexpected delight.

As enthusiasts for an industry so choked with new games and experiences, we all have to be selective with what we consume. There’s simply not enough time to play everything. It’s easy to make the mistake of telling ourselves that with our time so limited we’re only going to play the very best games available — especially when we insist on assigning number values to each game based on ascribed and often non-gameplay aspects like visuals and “lasting appeal” — but the danger inherent in that is overlooking or actively shunning forms of play outside the shiny, silky-smooth ones. It’s the difference between having a well-rounded diet and insisting on only ever eating grade A beef.
It’s not that Ouya is the only platform available that can offer surprising, different and unexpected forms of play — indeed there’s no reason why any game that’s fun on Ouya couldn’t be fun on PC, where experimental gaming and boutique indie games are most accessible of all — but what Ouya provides is a specifically appropriate environment to house the games.
It carries the same luxuries of optimisation — meaning no driver tweaks or configuration changes — that the other home consoles have over PC, and that easiness is well suited to the smaller experiences. This mode also restores the couches, the big screens, the multiplayer and the physical presence of friends that made games on older home consoles – from which a huge number of modern indie and boutique games take direct inspiration — so memorable in the first place.
What Ouya has reminded me of above all else is the pre-internet experience of playing games I had no preconceptions of, that didn’t require a huge investment from me and that friends and I could sit on the couch with and explore, regardless of whether it turned out to be a masterstroke of game design or kind of rubbish. The experience of not having to worry about anything beyond the game — not setting up a party or configuring controllers or managing my iPad’s battery or checking how critics scored the game before I put my money down. It’s a feeling Ouya’s designers are clearly aware of, given the virtual-shelf layout of the store and their mandate that all games be free to try.
The system certainly has its issues and is far from an absolute much-purchase machine. But from my perspective, regardless of its faults, there’s a hint of something pretty special in Ouya.