Gadgetory

we've been waiting a long time for this now it's finally here I'm Dan Ackerman with a first look at a lien where steam machine runs an operating system called steam OS valve is the company that runs the steam online game store they've also created cool games like portal and half-life and they've invited all sorts of PC hardware makers to make boxes that run steam OS and the first big one to be released is going to be the Alienware steam machine it should be out in November for 450 dollars and for that you get a basic looking box that's essentially a PC and a console box core i3 CPU custom NVIDIA GPU but most importantly this guy right here the steam controller so that the steam controller Val sent out to reimagine how you controlled games so it's got these two pans on it these two sort of almost touch pads combined with one stick and a bunch of buttons and Denton triggers and paddles this pant especially works almost like moving a mouse on a mouse pad or can work kind of like a traditional old-school trackball if that's what you want there are a lot of setup options and frankly in in hands-on use it works differently in different games better and some not as good and others so here's a really good example in BioShock Infinite I walk around the left stick like you would with a gamepad and then I use the right pad to look around and took a little getting used to I actually have to go in and tweak the sensitivity level on the controls we can actually go into the configure the game controller section and you can see how the controller here is is set up and then you can choose different configurations either recommended ones or ones provided by the community and as more people get this system hopefully they'll come up with their own key bindings and settings that work and upload them it actually works for here to go out with things like strategy games like SIF 5 where you really do have a lot of fine control to zoom all over the map and then take control of individual units but you'll also have the flexibility of using a mouse where you can really just very easily scroll around and then you can take the right stick and you can just move the cursor anywhere so Team Fortress 2 is a hugely popular multiplayer game and it's one of the ones like dota 2 that you can actually play on steamos and it's one of the ones where these steam controls even though it's a first-person shooter actually work really well so the controls don't exactly map one-to-one with what you'd expect from using a traditional gamepad or using a keyboard and mouse you have to kind of figure out exactly which command works with which button and which trigger and which paddle on here so it takes a little bit of getting used to it the real wrench in the system is there's a second version of this Alienware box called the Alienware alpha almost the same exact hardware but it runs Windows 10 and comes with a xbox controller instead of the scene controller and that lets you play all the games you can plan in here plus the thousands of other Steam games that are Windows only and the strange thing is that box in this box cost exactly the same so if you want to be adventurous and be kind of a pioneer in gaming then maybe consider the Alienware steam machine version if you're a traditionalist and you want to play upcoming games like let's say fallout 4 then take a look at the nearly identical handling where alpha I'm Dan Ackerman and that is the Alienware steam machine with steam OS