Change! Innovation! Weirdness! These are all things that led me to buying a Steam Controller. My experience since then has been a mix of wonder, excitement and frustration.

For those who are unfamiliar, the Steam Controller ($49.99 at Amazon) looks like this:

The Steam controller with included batteries, USB wireless dongle and PC attachment.

That might look kind of flipped when compared to this Xbox One controller, which you’re probably a little more familiar with:

An Xbox One controller — Credit: Microsoft

That’s because the front of the Steam Controller actually bends inward (concave for you geometry fans). This is to make it easier to access the signature feature of the Steam Controller — touch pads! Yes, touch pads have replaced traditional control sticks. (Except for that one stick they threw in at the last-minute when people freaked out … but it’s only one and most games use two.)

So do the touch pads they work for gaming? Yes … but it takes a lot of getting used to. I read in another review somewhere that this is like an “alternate universe” controller that decided against control sticks. Pads can work just as well, but the problem is our thumbs have become accustomed to the movements associated with pushing a stick.

As you might expect, then, the pads work best as a replacement for a mouse in games built for a keyboard/mouse setup. I found Valve’s flagship Portal 2 to work pretty darn well with this controller. However, in a game made for the Xbox controller–such as Batman: Arkham Knight–by default you have the pad simulating a control stick, and it’s kind of weird.

Also read: Steam Link: Great for console fans, but you might want to wait

See, when you simulate a mouse with the pad, as in Portal 2, it acts a lot like a trackball. Keep rolling it in the direction you want. It even feels good thanks to haptic feedback. But when it’s simulating a game pad, you’re “holding” an imaginary stick in the direction you want the camera to turn, and then returning your thumb to the center of the pad when you’re done moving it.

After about a week of play, I did find myself getting better at this. I could definitely play Arkham Knight and do well. However, I always felt handicapped anytime I needed to make small, accurate movements such as aiming the cannon of the Batmobile, or checking on the position of unsuspecting criminals before making a sneak attack.

Gyros and customization to the rescue!

After more time spent with the controller and hanging out in the Steam community, I found two solutions. One that made me feel a little better about the Steam Controller, and one that makes me think it might even work better than an Xbox controller.

The truly cool thing about the Steam Controller is that you can customize just about everything with the controller. This includes more than what the buttons do in a game. You can adjust sensitivity of inputs, turn the touch pads into a keypad and much more. And if that’s all too technical, you can simply apply control schemes uploaded by either the game developer or other people in the Steam community. Meanwhile, Valve itself continues to add more functions to the controller as users provide feedback.

The first thing I discovered that made Arkham Knight play more easily was the ability to change the behavior of the right touch pad (which stands in for the right control stick and controls the camera) to work as a “mouse-like joystick.” This mode, Valve says, is built for games that don’t let you play with a gamepad and mouse at the same time (actually I don’t understand how a two-handed person would do that anyway). Through magical engineering (or something), this just lets you use the pad as if it’s a rolling trackball.

That feels far more intuitive, at least, but it still does not feel super accurate, especially when you’re under fire in a Batmobile and a helicopter keeps dive-bombing you.

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That’s when I discovered motion controls. Or, I should say, the Steam community discovered them. Turns out the Steam Controller has a gyro sensor, much like the Nintendo Wii controller, which allows it to track physical movements of the hands. Well, what happened is that some genius (not sarcasm) in the Steam community got the idea to turn this feature on in addition to the mouse-like joystick behavior.

When I switched to this control scheme, I kid you not — it was like removing a neck brace

To turn this on, go to the controller customization settings and select the gyro icon under the center of the controller diagram (it looks a bit like an atom). Set this up as a mouse joystick and you’re good to go!

The motion controls let you adjust the camera (or your cross-hairs) by moving the entire controller up, down, left or right. To ensure you don’t do this accidentally, it only detects movement while your thumb is on the right touch pad.

This would never work by itself, because you’d basically have to turn away from the TV if you ever wanted to do more than 45-degree turn. But for small movements–lining up the cross-hairs or taking a quick peek at something peripheral–it feels very natural. When you do want to make a bigger turn, you swipe the touch pad like before … and to be honest it’s fine for that.

When I switched to this control scheme, I kid you not — it was like removing a neck brace. In fact, now I really can’t imagine going back to the old way.

Worth the trouble?

You might be thinking to yourself: “That sounds cool, and it’s great that you got the Steam Controller to work for you … but the Xbox controller already works for me. Why bother?”

Yes, I would agree that is a fair point. If you’ve got an Xbox controller already, and it’s working for you, and you have no desire at all to try something new, there really is little reason to get a Steam Controller.

Besides the pads, the Steam Controller’s other big issue for me is the placement of the A, B, X & Y buttons. While in reach, the placement of this diamond arrangement feels a bit low and could lead to some wrong presses until you get used to it.

Also, I should caution that I’ve only tested the Steam Controller in console-like action games. I’ve not tried it for mouse-intensive genres like real-time strategy. I’ve written this article from the perspective of someone who wants a controller for games made for controllers.

However, if anything about the Steam Controller intrigues you — perhaps the customization, or maybe just the fact that it’s not made by Microsoft or Sony — I am here to say that it is in fact a solid controller that can do a lot now and has promise to do a lot more in the future. Buying a Steam Controller is not the equivalent of buying a knock-off Mad Catz Xbox controller (sorry, Mad Catz) to save $10 off of the official brand.

You do have to go in knowing that it’s not necessarily going to work perfectly from the moment you start up a game. There will be fiddling. In the future, there will be more community control schemes available that will make this fiddling easier. But you’ll still have to fiddle to make the Steam Controller work for you.

Also check out my impressions of the Steam Link!

My early impressions of the Steam Link after three weeks playing with Valve’s PC game streaming system.

For a long time, I had this problem. Valve would announce these great deals for PC games on Steam, and naturally I wouldn’t be able to pass them up. The issue was that I was actually a console gamer, and my laptop at the time wasn’t really built for games.

So why did I buy games on Steam that I couldn’t actually play? Well, you see, I had this plan to become a PC gamer. I was living in Australia at the time, and so I told myself that when I eventually moved back to the USA, I would build a desktop computer and play all these Steam games I’d been amassing.

We made the move back to the US this summer, and moved into an apartment a little over a month ago. It was finally time–I was ready to build a gaming PC.

Or so I thought. See, I’d just purchased a fancy new TV, and now I wanted to play games on that. I reconsidered my gaming plan. Maybe I should spend less money on the PC–use that for productivity–and get a PS4 for games. But then again, what about all those Steam games?

That’s when I started thinking seriously about the Steam Link ($49.99 on Amazon). The device, released last month, hooks up to a TV and streams games from the PC to the TV over a wired or wireless home network. It was October and Steam Link wasn’t due out until early November, so I had no idea how well this would actually work in practice. But early buzz was good, and it seemed like it would satisfy my two main gaming desires–playing Steam games, but doing it on a TV.

Some of you may be asking, “Uh, why didn’t you just connect a really long HDMI cord from your desktop to the TV? Didn’t you say you’re living in an apartment?”

To which I would reply, “I have a wife.”

Trust me, the concept of Steam Link as a seamless streaming device that avoids the need for long wires is a very good thing. Anyway, it’s only $50! Get over it!

So I went ahead! With the help of a good friend who knows his stuff when it comes to computers, I built a new gaming PC and pre-ordered the Steam Link and Steam Controller (also $50 — I’ll write up some impressions of this product at a later date).

Setting up the Link

I was surprised by the smallness of the Steam Link .

The Steam Link includes plugs for multiple countries, HDMI and ethernet cords.

Tidy boxes for the Steam Controller and Steam Link.

My Steam gear arrived on November 10. I was amazed by the small size of the Link. You can look up the specs on your own time, but I’ll just say it’s got everything you need and nothing you don’t. And it disappears completely into the TV stand. Given how easily that can get filled up, that’s totally fine by me.

Connecting the Link to my TV was a breeze — the thing was pulsing on my TV screen before I even realized I had turned the thing on. It also recognized my controller right away without me having to do any setup other than connecting the wireless dongle to a USB port on the Link.

The Steam Link next walked me through connecting it to my network. Valve recommends a wired connection, but supports wireless networks including the fastest available, 802.11ac (5GHz). I’m doing a mix–my PC is hardwired by ethernet to the router, but I connected the Link wirelessly on the 5GHz network.

A quick word about my PC: My graphics card is an EVGA GeForce GTX 970 with 4GB VRAM. My PC has 8GB of RAM. The processor is Intel Core i5-4590 3.3GHz Haswell Processor. It’s not the highest spec PC you can get, but it’s pretty damn good.

Smooth video, but some audio annoyances

I put on Batman: Arkham Knight first. Maybe not a totally fair test, considering all of the issues the PC port has suffered. But the latest patch worked great for me, and it felt just like playing the old Arkham games on Xbox 360.

Next, I tried a game from last generation, Alan Wake, and encountered a major bug with Steam Link — audio crackle. In 1080p, the video ran smoothly, but the audio skipped and made crackling sounds. The next day, I tried Portal 2 and discovered the same problem. The video was running a silky 60 frames per second, but the sound kept making annoying crackling noises.

I started reading the Steam Link forums, and discovered quickly I was not the only one with the problem. A handful of users blamed some kind of interference involving wireless controllers, but most people seem to blame it on a bug related to using a wireless connection for the Link. What fixed it for everyone was downgrading the resolution to 720P.

I went back to Arkham Knight to see if I could figure out why that game wouldn’t have the same problem. Afterall, it was running in 1080p, too. As I went through the settings, I discovered the framerate had been set to 30fps. Shocked I wasn’t seeing the game in its full glory, I upped it to 60fps. As soon as I did, the audio started crackling.

Having to downgrade graphics settings for Link when they work fine on your PC is obviously not ideal. For their part, Valve has acknowledged the audio problems and appears to be working on it.

A recent update (Build 388) to the Steam Link included a “temporary” fix for the problem that seemed to resolve the problem for me in my games. According to Valve’s documentation, however, it seems that the fix merely limits the resolution on wireless networks to 1600×900. I’m still waiting for a more permanent fix that lets me play in 1080p.

Update: About a week after I wrote this article, a Steam Link update fixed most of the audio crackle issues I describe above. There are still occasional sound glitches, but these aren’t quite as distracting.

A lot of promise

It’s great to see Valve releasing a steady stream of updates to fix problems with the Link. And I should point out that the audio issue above is something you can work around. Unless your screen is massive, games still look pretty good in 1600×900 or even 720p. On the other hand, if you don’t absolutely need something like the Steam Link in your home right away, you might want to wait until all the bugs have been worked out.

Waiting will also mean you’ll have more features available. For example, you can’t today connect a USB or Bluetooth headset to the Link. It has USB jacks and Bluetooth, and the Link will recognize them. However, if you try to set it up for action via the Steam Link menu, the device will joyfully inform you that this feature is coming soon.

As an early adopter of the Steam Link, I kind of figured there’d be some kinks to be worked out going in. I mean, the thing works well enough. I’m playing games on the TV and having a lot of fun.

But I’m the kind of guy who enjoys installing updates and finding out what’s been changed for the better. A lot of people–especially console gamers–are used to their gaming systems more or less working right out of the box. They don’t want to play with settings or go to online forums to work out what’s wrong with their setup.

For those kinds of gamers, I really believe the Steam Link can still be a good option … but only in time.

The good news is that Valve seems to be working hard to make this product as perfect as it can. When I’ve had problems with other tech products in the past, I’ve looked online for answers only to discover the vendor had abandoned the product. This is not so with Valve and Steam Link.

But it still means we all have some waiting to do.

Are you using Steam LInk? What have been your impressions so far? Sound off in the comments! I’m also happy to answer questions or clarify any details about my Steam setup.

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Tag: Steam Link

How motion saved the Steam Controller