How Steam's Big Picture will liberate you from living room TV slavery altogether !

Hey you!  Did you know  Valve's Big Picture actually makes for the most awesome little picture too?

The point of Valve's Big Picture is to introduce your PC to your living room with a beautiful front end for all your hundreds of Steam games.. The problem with the Big Picture is you still need to have a PC connected to your living room tv and the problem with the living room for gaming is you compete for that space with all around you ... 

These days we love to play with tablets, phones and hand helds whilst we watch tv on the big screen. Right now I am working on a big screen, watching a film on a laptop screen with an iPad and Google Nexus 7 running other duties .. 

So where does the Big Picture fit in ? Most gamers would not risk their 4k gaming rigs living in their living rooms ... and then consider the cost of buying another gaming laptop or machine for that room and the Big point of the Big Picture seems totally lost ...

That is unless there was a cheap, effective and uber cool way of having all the features of the Big Picture but without any additional cost or moving expensive tech into the wild non gamer infested jungle of our living rooms.. My recent shenanigans with Splashtop THD on the Google Nexus 7 streaming Windows 8 and onlive games got me thinking. Why not take the best of the Big Picture and make it mobile .. freeing us from the living room altogether or allowing us to keep watching Die Hard whilst playing our favourite Steam games and here is how we do it and what would you know? Steams Big Picture makes an awesome front end for playing all your Steam games streamed to your Nexus 7. And here is living proof : First let us check out how the big Picture interface looks on the Nexus 7:

playing X COM Enemy Unknown

Shogun Total War 2 

Retro City Rampage 

All in all the Steam Big Picture front end runs excellently on tablets like the Google Nexus 7 , yes you could use the old Steam games list and store, but Big Picture is far more up to date with today's world of Metro live tiles, you can see why Gabe was so miffed at Windows 8 ..when he had his own Big Picture in the wings .. The way the opening screen is personalised to your game collection is very cool. As it is Big Picture is way cooler to use on tablets than on tvs .. now if Valve would only wake up to streaming, cloud gaming and throw in some optimisations for tablet users ..how cool would Valves own version of Splashtop THD be?  

A decade ago now ..really .. Valve shocked the world with the first digital delivery system , people screamed and complained about having to go on line to activate their game (Half Life 2) , it is time they did some as shocking and controversial again. 

You see Gabe , you have the right idea , people are moving away from their rigs for gaming , but they do not want to move them to their living rooms. What was missing in the Big Picture from the start was a way to stream your game from your gaming PC to your TV. And this is what Splashtop THD gives you , the ability not only to stream your game to your TV via a cheap tablet but to actually game, fully PC game on a 7 inch Android tablet ..not just in your living room competing for tv time but anywhere .. doing so with Big Picture as your front end on a device that weighs less than a joypad, has longer battery life and stays cooler!

Of course this way of gaming is not perfect yet , all the examples above really require optimised controls for tablets,  but that is where our feedback will hopefully shock Gabe and co into once again shocking the world, how about releasing Half Life 3 as the first streamed cloud only Valve game? 

Exciting times ..right I am off to play the game of the year winner Dark Souls using Big Picture on my Nexus 7 more 2 follow as soon as I can video the action and upload it... Now I can prepare to die anytime any where thanks to Splashtop THD, Windows 8 and Steam's Big Picture...

this content is © and originated from thegameveda http://the-games-veda.blogspot.com/  if you are reading it from any other site that has not provided a link back it has been leached