
Final Fantasy comes to Ouya - mmahemoff
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console/posts/278237
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mtkd
I don't get the negativity on HN for this project.

This team is trying to disrupt a truly oligopolist market - I really hope they
do it.

Give them a break on marketing announcement dissection at least until you see
what they build.

~~~
mrcharles
Actually, the problem is that the market they are disrupting... doesn't exist.
There's a mistaken idea in the public right now that Ouya can (or will)
replace dedicated consoles. That's not even remotely true. The system simply
does not have the power to be that device in your home.

Gamers seem to have backed this based on an idea that it's a $100 full fledged
console. It is not. It is, at best, a tablet that hooks up to your tv and has
a controller. At least as far as the hardware is concerned.

On top of that, their release timelines aren't even remotely realistic. March?
They don't even have their online store prototyped yet. They have some UI
mockups and that's it. Launching in March? Yeah right.

And then there's the issue with allowing the console to be fully open, using a
hardware platform that is already having so many issues with piracy that
developers are slowly being forced to release their games for free and
supported with ads to make any money.

I have no doubt that if this system ever materializes, it will make an impact,
but it's a long stretch to think you'll be taking delivery of this system in
March and playing Final Fantasy 3 on it.

~~~
dmix
It's important to have good skeptics critiquing your product visions.
Particularly if they are knowledgable and well intentioned.

With a big vision like this, it'd be concerning if everyone was just
cheerleading them on and being yes-men.

The realistic prospect for a product success is rarely heavily scrutinized.
And success rates are always statistically quite low.

Mr Charles raises some valid doubts about launch time. They're most certainly
not a stretch - considering the tons of horror stories about launching
hardware products we've seen on HN.

Let alone attempting to create a whole new market segment in a highly
competitive environment - where even with success - making money might be
difficult.

~~~
hammersend
"well intentioned"

That's the problem. I'm not sure how a reasonable person can read the outright
venom displayed in comment after comment all over the internet and then with a
straight face say that it is somehow well intentioned. I don't know why so
many people hate anything different that threatens the status quo. I guess
it's just human nature. The phenomenon seems to manifest itself particularly
in the consumer tech space though. The incumbents get praise heaped on them
for doing little more than tweaking and renaming their e-mail service but let
a group of people throw some pocket change at a video game console that isn't
backed by a multi-billion dollar corporation and all hell breaks loose. I hope
the Ouya succeeds if for no other reason than for the haters to have to wipe
the egg from their faces. But who am I kidding? They'll just find some other
underdog to kick.

~~~
dmix
As an entrepenuer, I'd LOVE to have people complaining about my idea.

For various reasons:

1) The idea hasnt come to fruition yet, so it can be shaped and molded with
feedback. (unlike color or cuil which both hard-launched with a full product
and strategy and no sense of reality)

2) People are talking about your company. peroid. Building something that
noone cares about or only gets the odd "thats cool" is way worse than having
pages of critiscm.

3) Knowledgable people are spending their time analyzing every part of your
business. For free.

Once you get past the sensitivity to rejection/bad feedback which all
entrepreneurs do in the first year, its not such a bad thing. Although
obviously not a goal one should strive for.

------
cdr
The Final Fantasy III remake port (as in III by the japanese numbering, not
american III which was VI) has been out for awhile already on Android. It
really works pretty decently for being on a phone/tablet, I recommend checking
it out if you can stomach $15.99:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.square_eni...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.square_enix.android_googleplay.FFIII_GP)

The game is a port of the DS remake to begin with, I doubt "coming to Ouya" is
much more work than maybe adding controller support to the Android build.

It looks like SquareEnix just released FFI also.

~~~
cdr
Now that I'm more awake and reread the Ouya post, it goes to great effort to
mislead which is pretty par for them. It really tries to imply that it's being
released specifically for Ouya with "partnering with Square Enix to bring
you", " first time gamers outside of Japan can play FFIII", "Previously
unreleased in the U.S.", etc.

~~~
jeremyarussell
To be fair they had qualifiers like "on the TV"

~~~
cdr
Yep - stretching as far as they can to mislead without outright lying. I'm
pretty certain if you didn't know that the game was already out on iOS/Android
you would come away with the impression that this was some sort of exclusive
deal with Ouya.

~~~
misnome
And... I suspect that this is the reason why so many people are very
suspicious of the project; they seem desperate to mislead as much as possible,
at every opportunity.

I understand that they want to drum up support and give a positive impression
so that more people will join in, but a little more honesty I suspect would go
a long way.

------
funkiee
I'm not exactly sure what they're saying here other than "Android games can
run on our Android console".

~~~
KaoruAoiShiho
They're saying "We got social proof from an A-lister"

~~~
debacle
FF3 is going to be coming to Android, Ouya or no.

~~~
eclipxe
It's already there on Android...
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.square_eni...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.square_enix.android_googleplay.FFIII_GP&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5zcXVhcmVfZW5peC5hbmRyb2lkX2dvb2dsZXBsYXkuRkZJSUlfR1AiXQ.).

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scribblemacher
The console doesn't exist yet and SquareEnix already is already making FF-
remakes for it! I'm happy to see a big name in the gaming business offering
some support, but I'm more excited to see some original, thinking-out-of-the-
box homebrew games. I want to play the next Cave Story; I've already played
FF3 like a bazillion times.

~~~
ajross
FFIII was an NES game. One presumes the "remake" is just running the original
ROM in an emulator. So the "development work" involved is essentially just
getting a license written up and signed. Maybe they'll update some copyrights
and artwork, too.

~~~
cdr
Nope. It was done as a pretty thorough remake for the DS a few years ago -
added 3D, changes to core gameplay (that were not very well implemented as
someone else pointed out), etc. These DS versions are what have been ported to
iOS and Android.

------
engtech
I haven't been following Ouya since the initial hype, but wasn't one of their
initial talking points that they would only allow free games?

I guess they're doing paid games now: "But that’s not the end of it: We’re
promising to deliver Final Fantasy III like you’ve never seen it before –
Hironobu Sakaguchi’s third installment in the role playing game franchise will
be updated to exploit OUYA’s high-definition resolution in glorious graphic
detail. For those of you who are new to Final Fantasy, we’ll offer a free demo
so you can give it a go!"

~~~
aaron-lebo
I believe the game either has to be free to play or have a free demo. So that
requirement is easily fulfilled.

------
duked
To be honest I couldn't care less about Onlive nor FF, I would like them to
focus more on either hardware such as Wifi, more Ram or an SD card port or on
useful software: Mame port or some useful license like GGPO (that could really
enable an xbox live like experience on arcade games). I'm a backer but
probably not their main usual target I guess, I'm more looking at it like a
Rasberry Pi alternative than a real gaming console.

~~~
mtgx
I still don't understand this craving for more RAM. Does Android need that
much RAM for a single game? Does iOS? Does Xbox360? The games for OUYA will
not be more powerful than that. And don't expect to keep the 1st gen of OUYA
for 7 years, if you really care about gaming on OUYA. OUYA is more like a
smartphone - something you buy once every 1-2 years, with much improved
graphics performance.

ARM graphics performance improves 2x every 12 months, so 4x after 2 years. In
fact I wouldn't be surprised if Tegra 4 brings that much improvement alone
over Tegra 3, since Tegra 3 was a pretty small chip compared to competition,
even at 40nm (therefore weaker), and Tegra 4 is rumored to have 64 cores (5.3x
more than Tegra 3). I would much rather like it to come with Tegra 4 or some
other 2013-ready CPU/GPU than more RAM.

~~~
cicloid
If you read interviews and/or talk to people in the industry, they would tell
you that more RAM expands the possibilities for many of the games.

Even for AAA titles like Battlefield 3, the difference in 64 players in a pc
to 24 players on consoles according to the developers, was mostly because of
the lack of memory.

1GB is huge for a game console. Just for comparison the PlayStation 3 has 256
MB of XDR DRAM main memory and 256 MB of GDDR3 video memory for the RSX.

~~~
mtgx
But the games on Android and iOS are limited to like 50 MB each. Why would you
need more than 20x that RAM for a single game that will look pretty much the
same as what you'll see on tablets and phones.

~~~
cicloid
textures

------
ThomPete
Perception is reality. To the geeks this is "just android in a box" to
everyone else this is a gaming platform that comes with a lot of games for
free and is dirt cheap.

People seem to have forgotten on of the major reasons why the PS1 became so
successful.

It wasn't it's superior hardware or software or numbers of colors. It was the
simple fact that it could be modded and thus allowed you to play games for
free.

~~~
slantyyz
>> To the geeks this is "just android in a box" to everyone else this is a
gaming platform that comes with a lot of games for free and is dirt cheap

I personally like Ouya, but realistically, the second part of your sentence
should be "to everyone else this is a gaming platform that they haven't heard
of". Only the nerds really know about Ouya, Joe Q. Public probably won't hear
about it unless the nerds who bought the first wave can make it go viral.

~~~
ThomPete
Never underestimate the next generations need for finding their pet pevee.
They know more about what is going on than you might think :)

------
danso
Call me disenchanted, but Square ports to iOS have been little more than bald,
lazy attempts to cash in on years-old, sometimes decade-old properties. And
I'm not talking about the original games, I'm talking about the _ports_
(usually for PS1/2/X and Nintendo handhelds) being 10+ years old. Virtually
every Square iOS port so far has dismal controls and little thought given to
adapting to touch-based conventions...Making Retina-optimized text is about
the biggest adaptation they've managed.

For these properties, they charge premium-based prices. For iOS, they don't
make them universal...which as a business decision is fine, if unpopular. But
they delay the iPad versions for months for inexplicable reasons, but I guess
there will be fans who'll pay another $10+ for the new version.

So I don't think the porting of FF3, widely considered one of the worst of the
early Final Fantasies, to be much more than another cash-in by Square.

* as cdr noted, the language to market this Ouya port is a bit hyped and misleading: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4317397>

~~~
freehunter
The remake on the DS was interesting for the fact that they actually put quite
a bit of work into it. I was happy to buy it because it looked and felt like a
native DS game (full 3D graphics, new audio, etc). The Final Fantasy on my
phone however, doesn't feel native. And they want $10 for it. No thanks.

~~~
Kuiper
The Final Fantasy III remake for DS felt lazy and suffered from lots of poor
design choices. As an example, the remake changed the availability of certain
classes, but did not change vendors' inventory, so you would run into
situations where the equipment available from vendors didn't match what
classes were available to you. Also, the class system lacked any semblance of
balance with regards to level-ups; the only stat that was permanently raised
when leveling up was HP, meaning that it was _always_ best to level-up as
whatever class had the best HP growths. Furthermore, HP growths at level-up
were based on a percentage of your existing HP, so if a character spent the
first half of the game leveling as a low-HP class, their HP penalty would
haunt them for the entire game.

I can't directly disagree with your statement that they "actually put quite a
bit of work into it," because they did produce new 3D assets, which is a non-
trivial task, and the localization had to be done from scratch since it was
the first time Final Fantasy III had ever been released outside Japan.
However, it certainly didn't _feel_ like a game that that got a lot of tender
loving care; it felt like a cash grab predicated on the assumption that people
would buy anything tied to the Final Fantasy brand.

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zokier
I'd assume that Ouya would get (S)NES emulators fairly quickly, if it manages
to launch successfully.

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jiggy2011
FF3? I thought FF7 was the one widely regarded as a classic?

~~~
lmm
Believe it or not the series contains more than one "classic" game. You're
right that FF7 is the most popular though; presumably they went with FF3 for
its lower performance requirements.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
Highly unlikely the performance reqs between the two (specifically the
DS/iOS/Android remake of FFIII vs. the PS1 FFVII) is that wide; Tegra 3 and
similar chipsets are definitely capable of eclipsing both. But they already
have a FFIII port mostly ready to go; FFVII has yet to be ported to anything
besides PS1 and Win9x. And in true Sq fashion, they seem to be saving a FFVII
remake for whenever they think they can extract the most cash from it.

~~~
cicloid
According to their CEO, making FFVII is admiting defeat and that they will not
be able to make a better game.

They will only release a remake when:

A) The money is needed/correct B) They make a better game in their view. With
I suppose, overwhelming success.

