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Ouya's Unsung Strength: Multiplayer For Parties
An anonymous reader writes: "Ouya, the Kickstarted, Android-based gaming console, had a much easier time selling people the idea of a mini-console than selling people on the console itself. Once people got over the excitement of seeing an indie console break into the market, they asked, 'Wait, why would I want to play Android games on my living room TV?' Almost a year has passed, and we're finally seeing an answer to that question: party gaming. It's one thing to play a console against your friends online, but when you get a bunch of people in the same room, most console games are too deep and complex to just pick up and play in a fun, semi-competitive way. The person who owns the fighting game is going to mop the floor with everyone else. Mobile games, on the other hand, are often incredibly simple, and Ouya forces every game to have a free trial, so you can easily weed out the ones that aren't good for groups. For example: 'In Hidden In Plain Sight, your character is one ninja lost in a sea of CPU-controlled ninjas with exactly the same texture. In the first few seconds, you have to walk left, right, up, down, anything that will let you understand which of the characters on the screen is yours. Once you've got that, you have to figure out your opponents. Any move that doesn't look like it's performed by the AI could give you away.'"
This is its only strength, something that is trumpeted from the mountaintops.
it is called nintendo
NES, SEGA, SNES -- simple, fun games that have been playable at parties for 30 odd years now.
Or the WII -- which is pretty much tailor made for this kind of stuff.
have we really gone full circle with "everything old, is new again"
I'm always looking for good couch co-op games (Fat Princess, etc.) although I'm not yet familiar with any current Android titles that do this well. Still, if developers start seeing this as a market with the Ouya, perhaps we'll see some more good news on this front.
Last I heard they don't have ot provide free demo's anymore either....
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
'In Hidden In Plain Sight, your character is one ninja lost in a sea of CPU-controlled ninjas with exactly the same texture. In the first few seconds, you have to walk left, right, up, down, anything that will let you understand which of the characters on the screen is yours. Once you've got that, you have to figure out your opponents. Any move that doesn't look like is performed by the AI could give you away.'
Yeah, there's a Wii U party game disc that has about a dozen variations on this; along with a dozen variations on a dozen more mini-game archetypes...
http://www.nintendo.com/games/...
Not to rag on the Ouya, but if this is the Ouya's niche, they're taking on Nintendo on their home turf, without Mario, Metroid, Zelda, or Pokemon... not even a Pikman or Skylanders to back them up.
The Ouya's about half the price after you get some extra controllers relative to a WiiU with a few extra wiimotes. But the value proposition of the Wii U is far greater... not to mention unlike the other current gen systems... they kept back-compat with the original Wii.
Maybe now tepples can stop rehashing the same point on every article in games.slashdot ;)
I've been saying this for years: party multiplayer is historically the big strength of consoles over PCs because very few people have a gaming PC in the living room. But there is a persistent console fan on Slashdot who likes to tell me that local multiplayer with friends is obsolete. Apparently unless you're still in K-12 school, it's hard enough to coordinate schedules for a friend match with your IRL friends, let alone actually getting together for LAN or same-screen multiplayer. He claims that the vast majority of gamers are adults, and the vast majority of adult gamers have moved on to online multiplayer with pickup groups of strangers.
It's not just the cost of the hardware. How much does an OUYA game cost (the price of the main entitlement) compared to the average Wii U game?
One of the best multiplayer games I've ever played.
SB II added way too many special bombs or whatever. Took away the 'simplicity' part of the game.
I was in unusual circumstances a few years back, which made social gaming not only necessary but desirable. (Necessary in the respect that there were very few alternatives for socialization, since we were working in an isolated area.)
I learned an important lesson from that: accessible multiplayer games can be a lot of fun. The only requirement is that there are a bunch of people in a room, and that those people want to have a good time. Once the games become online multiplayer, the lack of face-to-face interaction removes huge chunk of the fun. Once the games become too complex, skilled players do all of the winning and novices do all of the losing. (And how many people have fun when they are consistently losing?)
Now I can't speak for Ouya since I've never used the platform, but Nintendo did a good job of it with the Wii. From what I've seen of Android games, developers have done a good job of creating accessible games. (But since I've only ever played Android games on tablets, I don't know what face-to-face multiplayer is like.)
Combined with a USB MCE remote, the Ouya makes a fantastic XBMC media player -- there's a free 'official' XBMC release in the Ouya store which supports hardware video decoding, and plays back 1080p video without a hitch.
This is probably the very first time words "console games", "deep" and "complex" are used together in same sentence.
This is an Ouya avertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It contains cartoon vomit and a cartoon man beating himself to death with his own spine while up to his wasit in his own vomit. They could probably advertise better.
Some of the games are great fun. Ballistic in particular. Not a lot of thinking involved, but fast, fun, and pretty.
Draw Rider is good on the Ouya as well. A couple of others come t mind.
My kids refuse to play it for the most part - they are too into their Xbox.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I've been working on a framework/library for party games. Players use their phones as the controller but look at the same TV for the display. I've had 14 player bomberman, 17 player space wars, more coming.
http://greggman.github.io/HappyFunTimes/
Oh, that's right, you got your PS2 late in it's life so never did much online gaming.
If console games' online servers get taken down faster, how isn't that an advantage for PC games and their often player-run servers?
He claims that the vast majority of gamers are adults
They are, and have been since the PSone days. The average gamer is 31 years old. Didn't you read the ESA's 2014 report? Head to page 5.
That's interesting. In the 2011 version of the same ESA fact sheet, the average gamer was 35. I wonder what has been causing this downward trend. And that's still not a vast majority in the sense that the minority are an edge case not worth serving:
Just because 29% are a minority doesn't mean 29% aren't a market. Besides, don't a lot of parents game with their kids at least in part?
with pickup groups of strangers.
I didn't exactly say that.
Would "with pickup groups of strangers or with friends plucked from pickup groups of strangers" be any closer?
Where have you been the past 20 years, playing SNES games with babysat kids
Brawl is not for Super NES. Is PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale any better?
Ouya tracks which apps you use and you can't use any without an Internet connection. I asked them to stop this, and they told me they don't really care what I think. They are dicks.
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