suggestions for games worth trying with the steam controller:
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World in Conflict: It's an action-RTS thats pretty fun to play with mouse and keyboard but no fun with a gamepad and gamepad mapper. The steam controller is the first time you can really play this game from your couch without a keyboard in your lap.
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Wii Emulation: Wii emulation is already pretty terrific these days. You can run games in higher resolution, add texture fixes, even do things like use VR headsets. Obviously you can play with a real wiimote, but using a steam controller transforms a lot of wii experiences into something that feels more traditional. The right touchpad controls the wii pointer in games and can be mapped to control waggle too. Playing Mario Galaxy with a steam controller is nuts, especially when you map the button under the right touchpad to jump. Feels like a weird hybrid between Wii and gamecube controller in that instance.
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System Shock 2: This game utilizes a mix of a point and click adventure interface and FPS controls. Much of the time, you are maneuvering a cursor around the screen to do inventory management. This is another type of game that has never really been possible to play with a gamepad from your couch. The original SS2 has a special mode, btw, which enlarges the fonts that allows it to be a really good TV experience.
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ScummVM: Old lucas arts point and click games like the indiana jones or sam and max games are awesome with the steam controller for obvious reasons.
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Arcade trackball games with MAME: Much in the same way that Wii emulation is really awesome with the steam controller, finally you can play trackball games in MAME with perfect accuracy. Anybody who has fiddled around with trying to map a trackball to an analog stick in games like SegaSonic Arcade or Marble Madness knows how poorly the analog stick works in those situations. The steam controller finally lets you play those games the correct way. Recommended trackball games to try:
-SegaSonic Arcade
-Missile Command
-Marble Madness
-Any lightgun game (because you can map the lightgun input to mouse mode)
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MDK: MDK is a blast to play with the steam controller because of its unorthodox control methods. This was released back when PC fps controls were still sort of transitioning to WASD so it doesn't control quite the same way. Instead, you wind up with a wierd half-mouse set up where you can move like a normal TSP using WADS, and aim left and right with the right pad, but up and down on the right pad makes you walk forward or backwards by the amount you "click" the wheel. This feels really strange and surprisingly enjoyable. I'm certain there are other games you can play like this, but this is one off the top of my head to recommend.
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Internet Streaming Sites (Hulu, Netflix, youtube, etc): I see people complain about Steam not having a native netflix app, or hulu app, or whatever. What people don't realize is that you can add these types of shortcuts to steam by creating a simple batch file to launch your webbrowser of choice to a URL. As an example, with windows 10, if you want to open ESPN3 with the Edge browser, you'd simply make a batch file with the command: "start microsoft-edge:http://espn.go.com/watchespn/" and save it as something like ESPN3.bat.
Then, using a site like online bat to exe (
http://www.f2ko.de/en/ob2e.php) to turn your batch file into an executable, and then add it to steam itself:
And while those types of services need apps on other systems to control well with their controllers, the steam controller is perfectly suited to using their native web interfaces. Anything mouse driven - any sort of website, is great with the steam controller. You can use this method to add all sorts of streaming video options to steam. I hope that, in the future, steam has built in batch support without needing to turn your batch into an executable.
You can mimic analog controls by setting two stages of button press with the analog stick. So if you press it only a little bit, it just sends the normal keyboard direction input. But if you press it all the way, you can have it send the normal keyboard input + the button that makes you run. This will let you basically fake analog control. You can do this with FPS games too - have only a little tilt send wasd where full tilt sends shift+wasd or whatever key you assign run to. Or the opposite - little tilt sends ctrl+wasd (or whatever you have walk mapped to) and full tilt sends wasd.
EDIT: And yes, the game I'm most excited to play with the steam controller is MGSV. I can't play using my prototypes because you can't map those within steam anymore, so I'd have to remap the keys in-game if I wanted to use it.
if you'd like I'll make my layout public so you can see if you like it. even got screen shots, quick save and load mapped to the controller as well
