Why Hello, Giant Screen

Steam has recently come out with a feature called "Big Picture". It's currently in beta, but it allows you to plug your computer into your television and use a controller to play Steam games. It combines access to my growing Steam library with the joy of sitting on my ass in front of my television! Wowee!

I hooked up my Alienware m15x laptop up with a DisplayPort to HDMI cable I bought just because "Big Picture" exists, and I used some MotionJoy program to get my PS3 controller to work with my PC. I don't know how I got it to work at all. MotionJoy is not super intuitive, and I felt like a monkey, screaming and banging on stuff hoping something would happen, but eventually it worked.

Big Picture's interface is pretty smooth. You can get around easily enough, but the trouble is, the majority of my games are not really controller friendly. Even games that you would think should be, like Bit Trip Beat, said they had "Partial Controller Support". I don't know where that partial support was because when I got in-game, my controller didn't do jack.

The Playstation controller wasn't really listed as a supported device though. I may be suffering from some pains of not using one that syncs up all nice, with little goading.

Even though the controller thing didn't work out as well as I'd like, I am still digging simply using my television as a beastly monitor. I played Saint's Row 3 for three hours in all its ginormous glory last night. No...I didn't need "Big Picture" to do that... No, my cable wasn't long enough that I could sit on the couch while doing so. Yes...that beats down with a stick the entire reason why I was excited about "Big Picture". Back off, it was still fun. I just need to figure out the right combination of peripherals.