Look, do you see it ? Well can you ?! Its the salvation of consoles that what that is. Bringing the fun and casual and let's not forget AFFORDABLE back to consoles. When I was just scouring the internet and came upon this, lets just say that I was VERY suprised to see this. 

What is this ? Well this is the Ouya gaming console running on the trusty and hackable (in a good way) Android 4.0 ICS. First thought is, but Android ? Console ? Surely the graphics will be rubbish. Oh my dear reader, no no no, have you seen some of the games that are appearing on the Play Store ? lets throw about some fine examples such as the likes of games from Gameloft or that of EA Mobile churning out games that only the top-end devices are likely to ever play. Such games are Backstab and the new FF3 and lastly NOVA3 just for quick mentioning. Now I know this may be a bit lackluster when compared to the X360 or PS3, but now Android devs have a reason to actually develop much better looking games since the hardware that the Ouya is going to be using is possibly the best at the moment as well as allowing the use of OpenGL ES2.0 with 3.0 most probably coming to future Android releases which allow a game like RAGE for example to be ported to the Ouya with hardware permitting.

About the hardware, it's as follows:

Tegra3 Quad-Core processor

1GB RAM

8GB internal space

HDMI up to 1080P

WiFi 802.11 b/g/n

Bluetooth LE 4.0

USB 2.0 (one)

Wireless Controller with standard control (two analog, d-pad, eight action buttons, a system button), a touchpad

Android 4.0

So as we can see, the Tegra 3 processor with its ULP GeForce is a very beefy chipset and will possibly allow for sub-Wii or even better graphics.

Now what makes the Ouya revolutionary is the fact that when you go out and buy your console (by the way how much is that ? Ye expensive.) then you have to buy a game which due to licensing and what not they eventually get into your hand at around $60 which is a lot per game. The reason that games will be extremely cheap is that since the developer will not have to pay any form of duties to the owners of Ouya, which is what happens to the PS3 and X360 thus inflating prices, and the graphics language is open (OpenGL) there is virtually no cost that the developer has to bolt-on for you to take up. So when you pay for a  game it will be because you are paying for the dev's hard work and NOTHING else. 

The System: Now the owners of the whole Ouya project and backed by XBOX co-creator Ed Fries, Amazon Kindle's Muffi Ghadiali and IGN's Julie Uhrman have said that this system they have conceived will be completely open, COMPLETELY. Meaning that like Android on your phone, you can strip it down put your own flavour of the OS without voiding your warranty, basically go bonkers, even as far as hardware modders can then gain access to the device should they want to, you pay for it ? IT IS YOURS.

Gaming: Now as I have already said, the games that are already available to the Android Market look amazing (well some of them) and that the Ouya could possibly bring intense development so that games would look even better since the dev's would be developing for one chipset and thus can optimise like crazy. Now Ouya has one catch to all developers, some part of their game must be Free-to-Play so in essence all games on the Ouya will be F2P. Now you might be thinking but surely developers will not like this. Let's look at the likes of Team Fortress 2, League of Legends as well as the vast amount FPS's that are being released such as Tribes Ascend and Blacklight Retribution. But developers can offer a free demo with a full-game upgrade as well as in-game items and even ask you to subscribe. So the point is that everyone will have access to any game but may not necessarily be the full game, but just enough. As I have said about the open-ness of it all. This console will allow dev's to bypass all 3rd party payments and get their game directly to the gamer at a price that the dev want's it to be at.

Look: I'll admit, I don't really like the look of the console, to me it just looks like a hi-tech upside down toaster but hey if you want just think of it as the best-thing-evah!

Let me just be clear about this though, this console is currently not even in production, at this moment it is looking for backers so that it can produce such a device and then begin shipping as early as March 2013. Ouya has stated that they need $950,000 in order to begin development and I'm happy to say that on Kickstarter.com (a site for 

such endeavours), Ouya had hit their target with $2million in the first day and then has gone on to make just over $3.9million currently, two days of appearing on kicksatrter.com. In the time it took me to write this article it had risen by about $60,000 so clearly there is a demand. Now for those of you that want to contribute, please take a look at Ouya's Kickstarter page, there are rewards for people who pledge above a certain amount so you will probably go for the $99+ pledges. As well as just take a look at the mentioned page as i probably have missed out on some info, so take a look and watch the clip on the page hopefully this device does go into production. Oh and the VERY last point, all those Android apps on the Play Store cn be used on the Ouya. So everybody say, oooooooyah.

Clip of awesome games that run well on the Tegra 3 chipset:

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