With the holiday season approaching, sometimes it's hard to find the perfect gift for your loved ones, especially if he or she is into technology or gaming. It's such a vastly popular and vastly complicated area that if you're not sure exactly what your loved one is interested in, you could find yourself inside a game store being taken for a ride on expensive items that he or she doesn't want. If you know your loved one is a gamer but not too into the next-gen console experience from Xbox One or PlayStation 4, perhaps OUYA is the low-cost gift to get him or her this year.
The OUYA is a console that came out earlier this year based on a Kickstarter campaign to bring gaming back to developers. What this means is that the games available on the Android-powered game console will be less like the high-budget titles like "Call of Duty" or "Grand Theft Auto," which can rival many movie releases in terms of entertainment sales, and be more like an amalgam of mobile games.
Is your loved one obsessed with Candy Crush but capable of more? Then perhaps some of the simple yet addictive titles available on OUYA like "Meltdown," "Towerfall," "BombSquad" or "Neon Shadow" will be a welcome change.
To add a bit of gaming legitimacy to the $100 console, there are more well known games like "Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1" and "Final Fantasy III."
"Developers had moved away from the TV to mobile because it's easier and less expensive. This gave rise to amazing games like 'Candy Crush' that has no real goal, no story and don't fit into any genre, yet are still incredibly entertaining and addictive. What OUYA has done is provide an open, mobile-based platform for people to develop the games they love to play, then giving gamers access to play them on their television where they can have the best entertainment experiences with those games," OUYA CEO Julie Uhrman told Forbes in a recent interview.
The OUYA console is not going to satisfy that itch in your gamer's life to find a big-budget title. However, it's the perfect way to bring that same competitive and addictive spirit that mobile games have to a controller and TV screen.
"We want to be open and accessible to all types of games and gamers. Up until now, the television has been a locked box, but mobile opened the door to developers. We also wanted to create something that was affordable but still offered amazing gaming experiences, and that is why OUYA is priced at just $99 and all of our games are free to try - we want people to love the game before they buy it. OUYA also has a really powerful chip to create an immersive experience for people playing our games," says Uhrman.
Developers continue to create games and make them available on Uhrman's alternative console. So, if you're looking to get a gift for the gamer in your life without breaking the bank, OUYA might be worth picking up this holiday season.
