Ouya



"The revolution will be televised."

The Ouya was an Android-based microconsole, famous for being financed by a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, for crashing E3's parking lot on a guerrilla marketing campaign, and ultimately not living up to the hype.

It became quite controversial for the flawed launch: many backers did not receive their units in advance, early controllers had issues with lag (since fixed) and buttons getting stuck (requires a very simple hardware mod), poor wireless performance (the fix can be a setting on your router), and some games had performance issues for not being properly optimized for the Tegra 3 SoC (now there was no fix for that, it was a bit underpowered even back then).

On the other hand, it was dead-easy to port from Android (in fact you can just install most Android .apks without modding), so it quickly amassed a library of over a thousand titles — mostly mobile games, sure, but also media players and emulators for several classic systems (most up to PS1 run well, but N64 is very hit-and-miss). For a $99 machine, it was not a terrible deal. Then again, it was not a fantastic deal either.

So, well, it just didn't take off. Razer bought the company in July 2015 — not for the console, mind you, but for their online store, to be used on their own Forge TV console, and to be licensed to other companies' Android-based devices. Consequently, the Ouya system has been discontinued. At this point, it might be worth getting if you happen to find it dirt cheap in some clearance or garage sale. Otherwise, pass it up.