joeblow69

These things were released a while ago at $50, but were marked down to $5 a couple times. (they are back up to $50 for now)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/353380/Steam_Link/

My main reason to buy it was to play Witcher 2 on my TV. Has anyone else tried these things out?

My setup is completely sub-optimal, so the pretty bad results should be expected.

My PC and the LINK are just using Wireless. I think that's the biggest problem...lag. I'm using a wireless xbox 360 controller, and while the witcher 2 has control options for that, it just feels pretty molassesy trying to play.

I've even got the game down to 720p resolution.

So while it was a good idea in theory, it just isn't playable without ethernet. I might be able to find some long enough cables around here to hook it up proper and see if that works any better.

But there's still another issue ... all the text in that game even at 720p is REALLY small, and I can't really read it from my couch.

I'm not sure what games would work well with this kind of setup. Maybe point & click adventure games? I dunno.

What's weird, is games in Steam are categorized 3 ways: No controller support, partial controller support, and full controller support.

Partial controller support ( like Witcher 2) games work, but you have to manually launch them from your PC instead of the TV, because they have startup menus that are mouse driven (dumb)

AND, Steam doesn't even have an option like "Show me all the games I own that have full controller support" which would be very helpful.

Anyone else have this thing, and have good results with it? I kind of really want to play Portal 1/2 on my TV, so I'll give that a try next.

sydonesia

I bought it when it was $15, and even for that, I'm pretty disappointed. I hooked it up to an older TV and the quality just looked bad (like playing N64 on an HDTV bad.) The lag on the wifi makes it useless, so yeah, I stuck to strictly ethernet.

I bought a new 4K a week ago and hooked it up again and while it looked better, I still get much better results just playing Steam games directly through my computer.

It's a good idea, but the execution leaves something to be desired.

Noonan

I picked up one when GS had them for $5 as well. Still sitting in the box.

joeblow69

Well I've tried it a little more since then, and am suprised at how well it's working with other games.

Portal 1 sadly doesn't work at all, no controller support
But Portal 2 works great! My partner and I sat down for that last night, and got a good chunk into the game and we didn't see any problems at all.
I just tried Super Street Fight 4 Ultra ... and I have to admit that I'm not a big fighting game guy, so I'm sure that in order to hit the super exact combos or whatever, this might not be precise enough, but I swear I didn't have any problems with the couple rounds I played. Didn't notice any stutter or anything.

The graphics didn't look horrible to me either ... but for both Portal 2 and SSF4U, I didn't manually select any graphics settings, I just let it pick the default. And it seems ok?

I think it's just really heavily dependent on the game, whether it works or not. I kinda dig it now. Definitely worth the $5 + shipping.

** I'm actually kind of surprised that Valve didn't fix portal and half life 2 to have controller support when they released this thing

*** just tried Pac Man Championship edition. Was ALMOST working good enough, but there's just enough random lag to make it not precise enough. I wonder if going all ethernet would fix that, or not?