Hasta La Gadget!

The OUYA could change the gaming scene. The low price Android gaming set-top box has the makings of something great. But as the old saying goes, content is king and without killer titles, the OUYA will have a hard time attracting consumers and developers alike. Enter OnLive.

The two companies took to the interwebs this morning to announce OnLive will ship with OUYA. This means the little Android device will have access to first-run traditional gaming titles at launch. OnLive’s library currently includes Assassins Creed Revelations, L.A. Noire, The Darkness II and a ton more. Having access to this deep library will likely give the OUYA’s creators a bit more time to court Android devs to make exclusive titles for their new gaming device.

“OUYA is rethinking the console business, making waves by using standard technology to make gaming for your living room accessible, affordable and more innovative than ever,” wrote OnLive’s general manager Bruce Grove this morning on the company’s blog. “In OnLive’s case, we pioneered a groundbreaking, cloud-based system that instantly delivers games to any device on demand.”

Along with announcing OnLive, OUYA also revealed the latest design of its gaming controller. Don’t worry about the colored buttons, the company noted on its Kickstarter page that they’re just placeholders. “We won’t leave out colorblind gamers. “, they said.

OUYA is the latest Kickstarter superstar. With 5.5M in preorders on Kickstarter and 12 days to go, the device is exciting gamers and developers alike by bringing Android gaming to the living room. The company behind the product aims to bring it to market at just $99, a relative bargain in the space with the Xbox 360 and PS3 retailing for $199 and $249, respectively. Since the device is powered by a quad-core Tegra 3 SoC, the device should be able to produce quality graphics, too. However, in order to be successful, the OUYA needs killer games, which is something OnLive can provide in large quantities at launch.

This is has been a good week for OnLive. Just days ago the gaming company helped the $99 Vizio Co-Star Google TV device sell out in just 12 hours. OnLive, and with that, alternative gaming systems in general, has had a hard time breaking consumers away from the big three gaming companies, but it seems, at least after this week, that times could be changing.

The Android-based gaming platform known as OUYA has sent out an update letting both developers and end-users know that they’ll not only be given instructions on how to hack their devices, they’ll be given alternate software builds as well. This guarantee was initially only made to developers signing up to the development program for the gaming console, but other Kickstarter-friendly users have been assured of the option to root (with instructions) as well. The project known as Ouya has been quite vocal about being “open-source” since they first appeared on the croudfunding site Kickstarter some weeks ago, and now that they’ve raised many times their original asking amount to get their project in motion, they appear more than willing to continue with their initial promises.

For those of you wondering what’s going on here, the following nutshell explanation should suffice, starting with the difference between “hacking” and “rooting” : When you’ve got an Android-based device, you need to be able to get past a block or two before you can get at the guts if you want to “hack” the device. The OUYA device will be provided in two states, one of them “rooted”, one of them not rooted. The non-rooted device will also be able to be rooted with a set of instructions given by the manufacturer on request.

If your device is rooted, this generally means that you’re going to be able to make whatever changes you want to the Android software inside. The fact that the OUYA team is providing this set of root services to all of its users is unprecedented entirely. Google’s Nexus line of devices is root-able and Google encourages developers to get into the line’s insides, but never before has a company provided the means to do so with the product itself.

In addition, again, OUYA is providing several different software builds so that if you change your software in a way that leads you to a dead end, you can simply load the software given to you by the OUYA team and you’ll be fresh and clean. Have a peek at the timeline below to see all the other elements that are making this Android-based project a blockbuster over and over and over again.

[via OUYA]

OUYA team assures pre-hacked units on request is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Nom, nom, nom – that’s the sound of the Ouya games console, or so the Ouya story goes. Kicking off with a request for funds, Ouya’s Kickstarter support actually saw it pick up $2 million worth of funds in a short time, at it was just earlier this morning when we reported that the figure has more than doubled – hitting $5 million plus as at press time. All of this in under a month? It just goes to show that folks are definitely interested in a $99 Android-powered gaming console, no?

Unfortunately, it now seems as though the Ouya team needs even more money. Last Friday, Ouya founder Julie Uhrman mentioned in passing to Develop that “this is a really big undertaking and it’s going to be expensive.” Hence, they are looking for additional funds to attract developers and other partners in order to launch a successful console – something that is not too easy to achieve these days considering the traditional powerhouses of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony at the moment. Well, hopefully all of that money will be spent wisely, and that top talent will be drawn to the Ouya project.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: OUYA Kickstarter funding hits $5 million, ChargeCard – a portable charger for your iPhone,

The man responsible for Creative Strategy on Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty franchise has announced that his next big behemoth of a game, Human Element, will be given a prequel exclusive to the upcoming console known as OUYA. This console has gained significant traction in the last few weeks as its launch on Kickstarter blasted through all expected initial funding efforts, capturing the Android community as it did so. With an exclusive game launch as giant as this coming with it, the potential for failure should by all means be non-existent!

It’s Robert Bowling we’re talking about here, folks, and he’s announced his intent to release an episodic prequel to Human Element – a game slated for 2015 for PCs and whatever Xbox and/or Playstation is out by the time that year arrives. Have a peek at an interview Bowling did with Machinima at E3 on the 2015 game:

Robert Bowling has made it clear that this “episodic prequel” to Human Element made for OUYA will set the stage for the full Human Element in a few short years. For now, this will be the first ever release by the company Robotoki, a game developer company headed by Bowling.

Above have a peek at Bowling speaking about the prequel for OUYA and the rewards that backers will get even more exclusively than every other exclusive as well – so exclusive you wont be able to handle it!

Get your button smashing fingers out, folks, this is going to be a beast of a prequel without a doubt – even though this console is running Android, a traditionally lower-powered OS for systems that aren’t as beastly as, for example, the Xbox or the Playstation, here it’s powered by an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor. This processor has shown itself more than once to be more than beefy enough to take on high powered games – check it out here in our [Tegra 3 hub.]

Meanwhile you can still contribute to the OUYA project via Kickstarter. This project is at $5 million USD and growing!

[via OUYA]

Human Element prequel set to release on OUYA exclusively is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Just last week we announced that the OUYA Android-powered video game console hit $2 million on Kickstarter, and as of  today that number has increased by a lot. At this time of writing, the Kickstarter fund stands at $5,135,349, towering over OUYA’s initial goal of only $950,000. Over 33,000 people have forked out $99 to pre-order the console – which shows how much interest there is in such a console (after all, who wouldn’t like the idea of free games to play?).

While everything seems covered on the funding side, I guess it’s up to the folks at OUYA to work hard on finalizing the console and getting it ready for production. Mashable recently had an interesting interview with OUYA’s CEO which you can read here to find out more about the upcoming console, why he’s so secretive about showing off the controller and how they plan to curate the games submitted for the console. It sounds like he’s got everything under control. March 2013, we can’t wait to see how the OUYA turns out.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: ChargeCard – a portable charger for your iPhone, POP: a portable charger that charges up to 10 iPhones,