Although I have defended the Ouya in the past, I will say, it turned out to be a slight disappointment. At least the early adopter console and before it had a reported 700 games on the Ouya.
Today I review the Fire TV. I purchased it from Amazon, and when I got it, it already had the Amazon account I used to pay for it registered into the console. What this means is that I didn't have to even type in my credintials. Of course, you can manually type something in as well. But it was still nice of them to do this.
The Amazon brand Fire TV controllers were sold out at Amazon, so I purchased two $50 wireless aftermarket "Moga Pro Power" controllers. The build quality on these controllers is nice. I did experience one tiny cosmetic problem though - the player number indicator lights on the controllers always show player 1 with the Fire TV regardless of their true number.
A game which turned out to be my favorite on the system was one that I was intially skeptical of - a game called Sev Zero. It took me back to the days when games were a little simpler, back to Halo 1 for the original XBox.
Another noteworthy game, a racing game called Asphalt 8, I did seem to notice some choppiness with. Phone hardware like the Fire TV has just isn't very powerful for 3-dimensional racing games, as can be seen by even choppier such games on Ouya.
The User Interface of the Fire TV seems nice. I prefer it to the Ouya interface. Overall, the Fire TV feels like a console experience. However, the annoying in-app purchases of many games remind you that many of the games you're playing are phone games.
One drawback of the Fire TV is that it only has 5.5GB of free storage space. I filled up half this by installing three games on it - although two of them were the more bloated games, so I feel I can fit 7-8 games using its full memory.
Overall, the Fire TV is a middle-of-the-line, you'll-be=impressed-so-long-as-you-keep-low-expectations game player that is also marketed as a video player. I feel like as a game system, it neither offers the commercialism of a big-name console like the PS4, nor the "anything goes, including MS Paint drawings" indie perspective of the Ouya. It's somewhere in between, much like the iPad and the Apple mobile games market. As of now, at least.
My overall score: 8.0/10
