djc wrote:Very fitting topic as the Ouya servers just went offline effectively rendering them semi-functional (and new old stock or factory reset ones as paperweights). I'm still annoyed by this - I actually like the Ouya.
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Not to revive an old thread but...
By happenstance the other day I wanted to see if there was anyone still doing anything with the Ouya console. I stopped using mine shortly after the service was discontinued in 2019 in favor of an NVidia Shield TV (more on that later).
To my surprise, I learned that a group of people took it upon themselves to archive nearly the entire library of published Ouya games and created an API/server that the Ouya could connect to.
A very easy update to the Ouya console (copying a two-line text file to the main storage area of the console) restored access to the Discover channel and brought my Ouya back to life. Even more impressive is that in the last two years there have been a number of new homebrew titles created for the Ouya and available in the store.
This makes me very happy for a number of reasons. First - I actually like the Ouya so being able to have it set up again and fully working is a blast. Second, I started looking more into these enthusiast groups that work to keep older server based systems online and I found there are a number of them. For example, there is a group that has restored online capabilities to the Wii, Wii-U, and DS that were lost when Nintendo took the servers offline.
This gives me more of a comfort level with digital platforms because if there is a way that an enthusiast server can be brought online and made to work after the official servers close, it is in theory possible to keep these consoles functional for much longer.
Finally - the NVidia Shield TV. It's certainly impressive and being a streaming console, can play high quality AAA titles BUT I always felt like it was an Android box first and a game console second (which is the opposite of how I feel about the Ouya). Also I do not like the whole streaming aspect of games for a simple reason - when I first got my Shield set up, I loaded a game into my library and put in a lot of time completing it. When I got close to the end of the game, it vanished from my library because NVidia had a licensing dispute with the publisher so the titled was pulled from their service. That means all the time/effort I put into my game was lost which kind of sucks. I am much happier being able to download/install the games locally - of course physical media is better still.
TLDR; It's 2021 and my Ouya is pretty much functional again thanks to the people involved with the Ouya Saviors Project. And yes - I am equally shocked that there are others out there who like/use the Ouya
-DJ