The most exciting prospect is probably the fact

Whether these smaller games are your thing or not is something you’ll have to decide for yourself. There are some great gaming experiences on offer, if you know what you’re looking for, and the OUYA’s “Discover” section does a reasonable – if repetitive – job of surfacing some of the better games. The fact that each section of recommended games, be they the platform’s “featured” or a guest “playlist”, contains pretty much the same list of games is testament to how limited the selection is just now. But it’s early days and, if the platform’s “every game must have a free version” mantra doesn’t ruin the chances of developers profiting, there’s plenty of time for expansion in the software catalogue.

Everything on the OUYA Play section is playable with the controller but it’s also relatively easy to side-load much of the Android library, if you can get your hands on the .apk files that install them. The legality of this is often a grey area – some developers will just give you their install files while some apps can only be found by grubbing around in the internet’s less salubrious regions and circumventing the publisher’s approved distribution methods. Anything you side-load will likely have different degrees of controller support, most of it having been made for the touch-screen hardware that Android traditionally powers.

The controller, though, is awful. It feels like something designed by someone who has a vested interest in increasing the occurrence of hand cramp in gamers.Our MileWeb managed dedicated server are designed to meet the most demanding requirements for performance, Ergonomic, it isn’t.

It’s also shoddily made. The D-pad manages to achieve something I thought impossible: it’s worse than the Xbox 360 D-pad. For the style of games that currently dominate the Play section on OUYA – largely precise, focussed games in a pseudo-retro style – that’s unworkable. The triggers feel cheap and flimsy, with far too much sideways wobble as they descend and the face buttons are similarly spongey and regularly stick down, caught under the casing. The almost smooth, convex analogue sticks seem designed to offer the best possible chance of thumb-slippage and the trackpad in the centre of the controller is laggy and unresponsive. This is the worst videogame controller I’ve used in quite some time.

Happily, the vast majority of OUYA games are also compatible with one of the best controllers available: the PlayStation 3’s DualShock 3. Pairing this superior controller is simple, too, just plug it in once with the USB cable and it’ll pair to the OUYA and work until you pair it with something else. You lose the touchpad on the OUYA controller but there are limited use-cases for that at the moment anyway. Bluetooth keyboards and mice can also be paired, and presumably headsets would also work, in case anyone ports a chat app to it or a developer puts voice chat in their OUYA game. Unlikely? Maybe, but the potential of the OUYA is its most interesting aspect.

The OUYA is certainly not alone in the Android-powered games console market, although it’s the most well-known and probably the best funded. Competitors like GameStick and different approaches like Unu hint at the emergence of a veritable plethora of options in this largely unexplored mobile-to-TV market. It seems that numerous companies are seeing the potential in putting cheap (relatively) hardware, ostensibly for gaming, under your TV. The most exciting prospect is probably the fact that these systems are so easy to break into. OUYA might have a limited store just now but developing for Android is relatively easy and cheap. It’s also a hotbed for the retro emulation crowd – something that the OUYA supports quite openly.

Emulators are another legal grey area and it’s futile for us to go too deep on the discussion of the legality or morality behind emulating older systems on newer hardware. In very simple terms, emulators are generally perfectly legal but the software they enable is potentially still owned by someone else and running it on an emulator contravenes licensing laws. But it’s available, it’s simple and it works on OUYA. If you stick to emulating the games that you still own, on a tape or cartridge in your attic for example, you shouldn’t be straying far enough from legal or moral safe ground, either.

Solely as a games console, OUYA falls short at the moment and it’s incredibly unlikely that it will ever offer anything to tempt console gamers that generally stick to their modern military shooters, sports and racing games. If you like the kind of focussed experience that mobile gaming is abundant with, or smaller-scale indie games that don’t need the most powerful hardware to run on, there’s ample potential in OUYA. Likewise, if you’re keen on emulation (and happy with the ambiguous legality), OUYA is an ideal platform for you.
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