IMPORTANT UPDATE: It ends up the Ouya controller WAS the problem of my control woes as I got the Fire Controller from Amazon today and I can say that Crazy Taxi works just fine on it. The drive/reverse buttons are in their proper place and we have brakes! The gas and brakes or on the R and L triggers respectfully, so while still not that comfortable, work much, much better than before. I owe an apology to Sega for blasting their port when it was poor bluetooth controller support that was the main culprit.
Last week, I picked up the new Fire TV as a mini console for my living room. I like the idea of playing some mobile games on a full blown console but sadly, the Ouya just wasn’t what I wanted out in that regard. Fire TV solves that by not only having a ton of video apps, but much more popular mobile games rather than the overload of weak indy games the Ouya consists of. Very fun games like Asphalt 8, Rayman Fiesta Run and Riptide 2 occupy a decent launch library. Those games include some of Sega’s more popular titles. I tried out four of the eight Sega games available and sadly, the porting of those titles from seems to not have gone over as well as hoped. My impressions after the jump.
- Sonic 2 – is the least offensive of these ports. It’s said to have problems with MP, but I haven’t really tried that and I’ve almost always played Sonic 2 as a single player game so no problems there.
- Sonic 4: Episode 2 – had some poor audio issues, but that very well could have been my TV. The other issues are 30FPS on a system that can easily handle 60 for this game and Tails tag move being on the opposite side (b button instead of x).
- Sonic 4: Episode 1 – was obviously ported DIRECTLY from it’s smartphone version. Sonic is zoomed so close that you can barely see the rest of the level. Also, the resolution seems VERY low. I’ve seen Sonic 4 on tablet that was easily sharper than this.
- Crazy Taxi – is the biggest offender of them all. I thought it would be great to have Crazy Taxi on a console with its original Offspring soundtrack. However, there are so many problems wrong with this port that it makes it almost unplayable. The framerate is 30 FPS if that. The 15 year old Dreamcast can handle this game at 60 FPS and this system can’t? That’s not the worst. Gas is on R1 instead of R2, drive and reverse are on opposite buttons from every other console port and to quote Offspring, “No brakes”! I can’t find the brake button anywhere! Maybe it’s because I’m using an Ouya controller because the official Fire one is on backorder, (UPDATE: That’s exactly what it was) or maybe it’s just that lazy a port. What a horrible mess.
Not surprising. Probably most of the Fire starter games were simply quick lazy port cash-ins.
I was actually curious to hear about how this would go down. Thanks for the impressions.
Is the minecart still in Episode 1? I’d assume that they are.
Yeah. Though that’s not near as bad as the pinball level. Score 100,000 points on a really boring table to end the level. XP