As Ouya‘s release date approaches, the sense of dread at the system’s potential unpreparedness for market continues to build. Further evidence of the console’s technical issues emerged late last week when Eric Froemling, an Ouya developer working on the game BombSquad, posted about an issue he had been having with the Ouya controller’s analog sticks.
Froemling commented that while the sticks were easily capable of movement along the “cardinal directions” (left, right, up and down), moving along the diagonals was significantly slower. He built a simple piece of software to specifically test the controller, comparing the results with other competing controllers – namely the Xbox 360 and PS3 controllers.
The test revealed inherent “dead zones” in the Ouya controller’s diagonal movement range, an issue which neither the Xbox 360 controller nor the PS3 controller suffered from. From a development standpoint, games can be designed to avoid the pitfalls of poor diagonal movement, but players may be handicapped by this issue in other circumstances.
Froemling was able, at least in the case of BombSquad, to develop a software patch that alleviate much of these issues; however, the sticks still seemed to favour cardinal directions over diagonals. This entire issue seems to raise an important question: Will Ouya truly be ready for its audience at launch, or are these repeated issues signs of the company overshooting its mark?