In this Episode of the Cheerful Ghost Roundtable we talk about the Cheerful Ghost Games Club and what we've been playing with that. We talk about replaying Half-life 2, Guild Wars 2, Titan Souls and the recently released Hearthstone on phones. We head to the main Roundtable discussion covering GDC and Valve's final Steam Controller, Steam Machines & Valve's new VR headset. As always we keep the discussion fun and hopefully Travis can answer why robots kept him away from this episode as for now, it's a secret to everyone.
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I haven't finished watching the video yet, but I thought I'd answer Scrypt's question to the audience. On my old PC, I was trying to use a PS3 controller and that was with Morrowind. I tried XPadder or some other program, which actually worked when it emulated as an XBox 360 controller. I did finally get it working, though it took a bit of a process. When I got in the game, it didn't quite work out as I had hoped, so I stopped trying to use the PS3 controller on my PC. Last year, I bought a new Alienware PC and instead of trying to use a PS3 controller, I decided to buy a USB XBox 360 controller. That has worked out extremely well! I plug it in and it gets recognized. Recently, I've used it playing GTAV and I really enjoy it. I didn't have to do any configuration whatsoever for it to work, the game instantly recognized that I was playing with it. So, when the game was telling me how to use the controls, it showed the XBox 360 buttons. I did try the game with the keyboard and mouse, but thought the controller would make everything a bit simpler and give me more fluid movement. Thanks goes to Jon and Travis for their recommendation on getting that controller for my PC.
As for the Steam controller, I agree with a few things you guys said. I think the buttons being under the D-Pad area on the right might be odd, especially to someone who's used to having those buttons above. I'm not sure how it's going to work and I imagine for some games it might do well. Personally, I'm happy with my current set up and don't anticipate getting a Steam controller.
Thanks for the reply, @GregoPeck. The convenience of the XBox 360 controller is certainly a good thing. I'm thankful, since, in general, I prefer playing games with a controller. I thought Sony had mentioned driver support for PC for the DualShock 4 at some point, but that could have been a dream I had.
From what I've read about the Steam controller, it seems that the games will have to support it in order to get that same type of native recognition. Otherwise, you'll have to do some button-mapping to get the games to work. I don't anticipate the controller to natively support most Steam games. I'm sure Valve will have some user-contributed database of layout options that you can download from, but then you'll probably still have to do some tweaking to suit you're needs. Native SteamOS games won't have this problem. Developers are probably already being encouraged to patch their existing offerings with Steam Controller support.
I think the Alienware Steam Machine is at the top because the list looks like it's in alphabetical order. That $5,000 one is seriously awesome (hardware wise). 8TB SSD, that sounds awesome! Still, I spent less than that on my Alienware PC and it's superb, so I don't expect to be buying another PC or even a Steam Machine for a very long time.