The holidays are quickly approaching and people are trying to decide which game console to buy. Should you go with the Wii U, PS4 or Xbox One? That’s a question that I can’t answer, but Ouya can.
In an attempt to make you drop $100 on the micro-Android console this holiday season, the Ouya team has updated the system software with its biggest patch yet. The new update – codenamed “Abominable Snowman” – brings with it a number of new UI tweaks and storage options.
With this latest update, the UI is seeing the most change with an increased focus on ease of use and readability. Here’s everything that you can expect to see:
Ouya is now more intuitive, visually appealing, and better able to feature your games. It’s even got built-in functionality to allow us to update featured games and the wallpaper on the fly.
All game titles are now underneath the tile art, for easier browsing.
Tiles have new icons for installed games and game with available updates.
Controller icons now appear for all connected controllers and will give a low battery indication.
Here’s what it looks like:
In other good news, double-tapping the Ouya button will now bring up the system menu instead of exiting the game. From the system menu, you can exit games, eject external drives, turn off controllers or put the Ouya into sleep mode.
The other major update in the latest system software moves external storage support from closed to open beta. In other words, all users can now plug an external USB drive into their Ouya for additional storage. Here’s what you need to know:
We support NTFS, FAT32, and ext4 file formats.
Games on external storage are currently associated with the OUYA they were downloaded from (so you can’t use the storage to transfer a game from one OUYA to another. Sorry!).
If you’ve modded your system with apps like Link2SD, you’ll want to undo your changes in order for external storage to work.
You may notice some slowdown while a game is installing to USB. This is expected and is something we hope to address in future updates.
After downloading a game to external storage, sideloading an app will put it on external storage.
Some games do not properly move their saved game data when moved to an external drive. If this occurs, you can move the game back to its original location to recover the save files.
When connecting a USB drive, scanning can take a few minutes if lots of games (100+) are installed. We plan to improve this in future updates, but if you download all of DISCOVER, scanning will take a while.
Occasionally on bootup with an external drive attached, the screen wil go completely orange while the scanning takes place. You can wait for the scanning to finish, or reboot. We are looking into a fix.
When ejecting the USB drive, sometimes it will say a download is still going even if one isn’t. We are working on a fix for this.
For all other changes, including some minor bug fixes, check out the Ouya post about the latest update. You can grab it from the system update option on the Ouya console. There’s no word on whether or not the system update will be pre-installed on Ouya hardware sold during the holidays, but it would be nice to have one console this Christmas that doesn’t require a day-one update.
[Image: Ouya]
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