Yo wassup Ubisoft? You want Rayman in Smash? Of course! We love Raym-
What's this? Rayman Legends is not Wii U exclusive anymore? It's delayed to make it multi-platform? AND you're holding back games until we sell more consoles?
Trophy status. We're also going to take the picture from Rayman's bad side so he looks like an idiot and emphasize how you guys made the model, not us, and therefore didn't get the respect he deserves like the other guys.
Hey and remember when you guys said making playable female characters was hard?
So last December I received an email congratulating me on being chosen to receive one of Valve’s 300 Steam Machine/Controller prototypes. A few weeks later, I was alerted by my dorm’s mail office that I had received a package. Giddy with excitement, I rush down to claim my prize, only to see a student worker lug an enormous monster of a crate. Suddenly I felt the whole room look at this fabled Behemoth described by Job in biblical times. It seemed like too much effort to describe to the crowd what exactly this mysterious object was, so I thanked the worn out servant for his underpaid efforts and set out to bring this beast up two flights of stairs.
Well first thing… the handle fell off, and I dropped this precious creature onto cold, concrete tiles.
Uh-oh.
Thankfully, the machine still worked. Then again, I’m not surprised. Even atomic bombs don’t have this much protection, and they’re well... you know, atomic bombs.
So I played with the Steam Box for a little bit before proceeding to leave it unplayed for months, which notably is also the condition of my Steam library. When you live in a crowded college dorm, it turns out that it leads to a lack of opportunities to utilize the community television. That, and you don’t really want people know that you have a very precious object in your hands.
I've had some more time recently though to really get to know the Steam Controller and Steam Box enough to really write a fair and accurate assessment of it.
I’m going to divide this into two parts. First up...
Part 1:
THE STEAM CONTROLLER
Look at this flimsy piece of plastic. Who’s gonna buy it?
Just kidding. Keep in mind it’s just a prototype, and Valve just announced a spanking new design a couple of months ago, so now it’s gonna be me attempting to explain why Valve is changing their old design.
It doesn’t play as bad as one would think. Like many more have said before me, it requires some getting used to.
The button layout is pretty much the same as many modern game controllers. You got your shoulder buttons, trigger buttons. One cool new advance, though is the bumper buttons on the bottom of the controller. It surprises me how none of the major console makers haven’t thought of this yet. It seems like such a natural extension of the traditional button layout, although admittedly I did press them accidentally a couple of times.
The buttons in the middle are awkwardly placed. Never occurs to me to press them, even though I assign keys to them. Not to mention they look weird. I’m glad Valve decided to get rid of them, as I don’t see any gamers using them. This is a controller, not a keyboard, so simplicity is key (excuse the pun).
So this middle bottom button brings up the Steam overlay, while the left button is tab, and right is escape. Looks like Valve decided to move these in the center in the new model, which makes sense as they’re way more important than what the original design had them out to be.
Now we can to the most exciting part: the trackpads. Although they seem intimidating at first, they’re actually really easy to use. It’s cool how you just have to touch a part of the trackpad to move around instead of pushing a joystick, but I can get that people would much rather have the physical interactivity of the latter. Personally I’m a little torn after playing with the controller. I’d like to point out that Valve has added some little features here and there to make the transition easier. The outer ring of the trackpads, for example, can be set to the “run” key, so you can emulate pushing a joystick all the way to move your character faster.
How does it play? Right now, it plays like a compromise between the keyboard and mouse setup and a regular controller. So for the most part, it’s okay. For platformers, it’s better than just using a keyboard, but it’s not as good as a regular controller. For FPS’s, it’s better than a regular controller, but not as good as a keyboard and mouse setup. What we've got is a controller that can’t replace anything, but it’s good enough that you don’t really mind playing with it.
I played Super Meat Boy and Portal, which played fine, just required some getting used to. Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, however, I struggled with due to the hectic nature of said games and how slightly imprecise the trackpads are compared to a mouse. I need some more time to get used to them.
Being a less hectic game, Papers Please worked pretty well, but some parts were difficult as again, it’s a game that involves preciseness. It’s much better than playing with a regular controller though.
Recently I played Monaco with the Steam Controller. I had a blast with it, only problem is that the key that triggers shooting your gun/other special abilities was set to the button on the left trackpad, leading to a lot of accidental presses, a bad thing for a game revolving around stealth. That’s my only real problem with the controller. The buttons on the trackpad are too sensitive. This is probably adjustable though, and I’m just too lazy to change it.
One final thing I’d like to talk about: customization. This is where the controller really shines. It’s awesome how you can change the controls to whatever setup you feel most comfortable with. What would be helpful, though is if games could display what their default keyboard controls are to make customization quick and easy if we feel the need to change the controller’s defaults.
Overall I feel like Valve wanted to do exactly what the controller does: make a compromise between controller and mouse/keyboard controls. It's not perfect, and of course sometimes the old way is better, but it's a start. I'll have more on my thoughts about Valve's goal with this whole project in Part 2.
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