Well, gave the Link and Controller a decent shake today with a couple of hours couch gaming with my 5yo nephew (Huzzah, he is a .
Fired up Mickey’s Castle of Illusion and Sonic All-Stars. Flawless both of them. Castle of Illusion is a hoot! Moved on to more advanced stuff with Spelunky and Transformers Devastation. Both worked admirably but were beyond the 5yo, as they are beyond me!
Yeah, Amazon! Grabbed them when they were in some bundled special a while back - USD$100 including shipping. Been mostly playing some CR on it. They seemed to have no compunction shipping to Oz. Though you may need to point out Darwin on a map for them… ;)
How in the world did you find that out? Registry surfing? Something to point you towards that? To me that sounds like you found the eponymous needle in the haystack!
That was just judicious googling and checking out everything I found really, and not so much me figuring it out. Checking that everything was on the same network (and SSID) was one of the first things I looked at, but finally found a set of tips that suggested looking at the registry. I never would have thought of that on my own.
$20 on Amazon right now:
Looks like steam is going to have it on sale too, but can’t get it to load right now.
My link and controller are still in the box from last year. Yikes.
Yeah, it collects dust for me too.
I’m using the Controller mostly as a more ergonomic substitute for the mouse (I’ve had some RSI issues of late) but I want to unlock its potential for use with games (I used it for XCOM 2 and it worked great, although there was one non game-breaking bug that may have been fixed by now).
I used my link to play SOMA. It worked great, except when it didn’t-- sometimes it would just start to fail, with green lines going across the screen. I think it’s overheating or something. Shrug, only $20.
I use my link all the time I think it’s awesome. I was kicking myself for not picking up another when they were on sale around Thanksgiving for $20 so I’ll make sure to take advantage this time.
I don’t use the controller at all really. I never gave it much chance though because when playing a game with controller support I prefer the 360 controller. If it’s a KB/M game then I just play at the PC so I’ve not had much of a use for the hybrid nature of the Steam controller. I’ll have to give it a try again though I did always want to try the motion control aiming stuff.
Yeah, I’m not a fan of the controller. I feel like a regular controller ie 360 or ps3 controller is a lot better, and the steam controller really only works if you want that mouse action without a mouse. It’s good for that, but not as good as M+K.
The green lines sound familiar. In my case I’m not sure if it is the Link or the HDMI switch I use but if I switch to a different source and then go back to the Link I get a wall of green static. I have to unplug the power to get it back. For whatever reason my Fire Stick seemed to randomly take over and would screw it all up.
Yep, sometimes unplugging the HDMI port fixes it. Something with the HDMI on the steam link, that’s where it’s overheating.
I picked up a Link (no controller) during the autumn sale. It’s pretty good on 5GHz. I’ve been playing Watch Dogs 2 on it and while you can see a slight degradation in picture quality, the lag isn’t really noticeable. It’s also the easiest way to get screen mirroring with my setup, short of running a very long HDMI cable between rooms, so I use it for that quite a lot, especially now that the Comedy Central channel on Plex is broken.
This PC Gamer guide to configuring the Steam Controller looks interesting: http://www.pcgamer.com/steam-controller-setup-guide/
The Steam Controller’s fantastic, if you’re willing to fiddle and experiment with it. If there’s something about a control scheme that bothers you then chances are you can fix it or make it significantly better.
Take Helldivers for instance. Some people use the SC to emulate mouse with the crosshair/pointer for aiming but with WASD mapped to the thumbstick for smooth directional movement. I used the SC as a controller but adjusted the d-pad so it wasn’t possible to press diagonals like on a 360 controller, this way making strategems much less of a problem to call down in a pinch. You can also adjust the response curve on the trackpads so ‘aggressive’ ramps up and maps to your movement faster, handy for twitchier games, while ‘relaxed’ or ‘wide’ is good for racing games where thumbsticks can be a little too twitchy and sensitive.
If the Steam Controller doesn’t feel right ‘out of the box’ then you probably haven’t toyed around with it enough. You get out of it what you put in, I suppose. Community configs can be a good starting point but they can also be hopelessly confusing if you don’t know the game at all.
You’ve convinced me to buy one. Naturally its your fault if I don’t like it though!
Holy carp, Valve charges eight bucks for shipping the Link! And $12 for Link + Controller! Now I wish that I’d jumped on the Amazon sale, could have had free 2-day shipping.
*Edit Aha, Amazon still has it on sale, it was just buried on their site.
If you’ve any questions don’t be afraid to ask!
The steam link is amazing (and so so much smaller than I expected). I recently got a 2nd TV and moved all my consoles from the main family room (i.e. wife tv watching room) to a more dedicated game room but I haven’t had a chance (or motivation really) to put in ethernet jacks in the room. When I bought the steam link I got ready to do the ethernet drops but right now I’m thinking I won’t even bother.
Even on 5Ghz I have zero lag (PC is already hardwired though). Picture looks great, haven’t noticed any hiccups at all. It almost seems pointless right now.
It’s even more impressive because I used to have a Nvidia Shield and that used to be hard wired and yet I stopped using it because some games like Rocket League had noticable lag. So somehow Valve has done an even better job than Nvidia on keeping lag down even when Nvidia was able to have GPU integration for it.
While I"m happy with that purchase I"m extremely not happy with the controller and will probably send it back for a refund. I spent a bunch of time trying it out with several games, and while I got it passable it turned into a “why bother” exercise. It has some really nice ideas but at the end of the day I’d rather just use a wireless mouse and keyboard or any of the 360/ps4/ps3 controllers I have laying around (which all seem to work natively with the link according to the nets).