For those of you who don't know, steam recently released, or plan on releasing a TV compatible version called "Big Picture" which is designed to run on your TV allowing you to play your games on your tv in the living room instead of sat at your computer. It is also designed primarily to be used with a controller, and most controllers are compatible with it, however for this review / first look, i will not be using a controller. I will also be using it sat at my PC and not the TV
Overall looks are pleasing, its nice and simple and uses a grid layout similar to that of the xbox 360 and windows 8 but not nearly as complex in my opinion.
So to get access to the beta, you need to opt in to the steam user beta in your account settings, restart / update steam and you will get it. To launch the Big Picture, you simply click on what i like to call 'the big button' at the top right of your steam window, its hard to miss really.
Once you launch it, you are greeted by a nice splash screen that lasts a few seconds until you are taken to what i will call the home screen. Here you have a few options. The obvious ones are "Store", "library" and "community" but you can also choose between "friends" in the bottom right, "web" in the bottom left, and downloads / profile at the top left. I will get to those later.
Store
Firstly, lets have a look at the store:
When you enter the store, you are presented with a row of featured games, just like in the ordinary steam browser. You can click and drag with the mouse or use your controller to scroll from left to right. Beneath those are 5 categories that you can see are "genres" "top sellers" "specials" "coming soon" and "new releases" so it is fairly straight forward and simple to use. Moving down and clicking one one of these will take you to a grid view pictured below:
Pick a tile of your choosing and it will list all the items under that category for you to scroll through.
I was quite impressed with the simplicity of Big Picture, for example when you are viewing a game in the store it is quite straight forward and very basic. You have the trailer video as usual, and then images to scroll through next to it, just like the browser version on steam. Below that is where you purchase the game or view more details.
When you click one of the boxes, such as the "details" box, you get a little pop up with a brief summary:
You are also given the option to view it in further detail by choosing one of the links it shows:
Again i was impressed by this is it is still kept very neat and simple. For this review / first look i decided to leave out the purchasing of games, mainly because it is just the same as buying it in the normal browser, and didn't quite work for me. However i did buy a game when i was taking the screenshots.
Library
Next we move on to the Library. When you go into your library it shows you your recently played games with an option below to view all of your games. When you view all games it puts it in a tiled layout with images so you know exactly which game is which. Again you can scroll left or right to move through the list
When you click on a game you own, you are given a very simple layout of 3 things, "links & more" "play" (which im assuming is "install" if you haven't got it installed" and "recent news". Clicking play will launch the game although i didn't have any success when i tried that.
Community:
Next we move onto the community tab. Here at the moment, it just gives you a list of your friends to scroll through, you can click on a friend and a menu will pop up giving you several options such as "send a message". I hope more gets added to this section in the future such as groups and game hubs.
Web Browser
Big picture also comes with its own web browser, which is very similar to internet explorer 10 in windows 8. To access it you click on the "web" button in the bottom left corner from pretty much any menu. It is split into 3 sections, "Favorites", "Current" (currently open tabs) and "History". Thats right, it is now very easy to view peoples browsing history and even gives the site a nice preview image for food measure
.It will open up its browser by default on the favorites tab, or it did with me anyway. There are already a few default favorites in there such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit but you can add more if you like.
Current, just basically shows you what web pages you have open.
History shows you your recently visited pages, and frequently visited pages.
Here is a quick image of the browser it's self:
Friends
Another way to access the friends list is by clicking "Friends" at the bottom right of the screen, this brings up a more detailed view of your friends list and is split into two tabs, "friends" and "groups" here you can view groups and join group chats, start conversations with friends as well as voice chat.
Downloads
If you have any pending downloads, updates or in progress downloads, it will appear in the top left of the screen next to your profile picture. You can click this and it will take you to a small overview of whats downloading.
Now unlike the traditional steam browser, this displays progress bars for each game ad well as total download rates in a summary. Clicking on an individual game with show you how much you have left to download and your download speed. There are a few extra options here.
Small extras
There are a few small things i didn't really think where worth doing a whole section about.
For example there's a small feature when you click and hold one of the main buttons, such as community that (see image below) shows little images representing that section.
To access your settings you can click the cog at the top right of the screen and here are just the general settings for steam as well as a few extras for your TV like which HD resolution to display it in (720p or 1080p)
You can also go straight back to the home screen at any time by pressing the Steam icon in the top left or by pressing the home button on your controller.
Final thoughts
Overall i was quite impressed by it. It is something different yet it is so very simple and easy to use, it looks neat and nothing is really cluttered. I really do hope they do more with it and add more features in the future. I think they are also testing how doable this is in terms of a console as they are working on a hardware based project as well
I really would advise checking it out for yourself if you use steam as there are bound to be a few things that i have missed as usual.
Thanks for reading, as usual constructive criticism is welcome.
