My First Week With an Amazon Fire TV

I was wanting to update my prior Unboxing and Day One Impressions post that I made regarding The Amazon Fire TV. After my inability to find The Simpsons: Tapped Out on the Fire TV as well as the need for a game controller, not included, to play Minecraft, I made it a goal to find a game that I could play on the Fire TV.

My third attempt at playing a game on the device was Sonic the Hedgehog, I already owned the game and when I clicked to play it I was met with a familiar error message.







I was now 0-3 in playing games for the Fire TV, I decided that I was going to pay for a game that was not only Fire TV compatible but also one that I knew the controls would not be more difficult than the included controller. I downloaded Plants vs Zombies and when I did not receive the additional controller needed error message when I started it up I was optimistic. At the menu screen for the game I could not do anything, literally nothing. I decided I was done with trying to play a game on the Fire TV, I resigned myself to the fact that all new devices have issues and one of the Fire TV's issues was that it would not play games. I made a plan to contact Amazon the next day regarding Plants vs Zombies but before I could, they e-mailed me.

• We're contacting you about order # for "Plants vs. Zombies." We recently learned that this app isn't compatible with Amazon Fire TV. As a result, we've issued a refund to your account without revoking access to it. The app will therefore no longer be available in your Amazon Fire TV app library.
  
  This refund will be applied to the payment method used for the original purchase and should complete within the next 2-3 business days.
  
  We're very sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.
  
  We hope to see you again soon.
  
  Sincerely,
  
  Customer Service
  Amazon.com

So I can't play it on my Fire TV but they refunded me the purchase amount plus it is still accessible on my tablet and smartphone, good looking out Amazon. Still it would be nice to actually be able to play a game, I turned to a title that I own but haven't played in almost a year, Quell. Quell is a simple puzzle game where you can only move in any of the basic four directions (up, down, left right), the game looked the same as it does on my Kindle Fire tablet, then again I don't know what I was expecting given that Quell's graphics, like its controls, are very simple.

Now that I have managed to play a game on the Fire TV I can focus on some of its other features. The voice controls work for Amazon's digital library which is a good thing but when I am watching Netflix and I voice command a show it kicks me out of Netflix and moves me to Amazon's library. Keeping on the subject of Netflix, the video quality is noticeably inferior to that of Amazon's Digital library, I regularly notice that Netflix's video quality can vary from good to bad yet Amazon's featured content is always good. It also takes a while, for me at least, to get the next video to load on Netflix after the countdown ends while watching a TV series.

I did finally get voice command to work for Flight of the Conchords but searching only for "Flight of The", it was the fifth title listed. I still see no reason that the Fire TV will replace anything currently in my media center, I would say without question that my Xbox 360 does everything the Fire TV does and more, plus it does it better. I could also be a little harsh on the Fire TV because when I was watching the Mad Men midseason finale on my desktop I accidentally touched a button on the Fire TV controller and it automatically changed the video source off of my PC. This could be considered a nice feature if you don't want to have to find the TV remote to change the video source but understand, there was nothing nice about it when it happened unintentionally. I do not dislike the Fire TV but I am confident that it is not for me and I doubt that I will keep it much longer before I return it to Amazon.