Nvidia Shield

Hi all, I recently ordered an Nvidia Shield. I couldn't find any topics about it on the forum, so I figured I'd start a discussion. If anyone else has one or has opinions on it I'd like to hear them! I'll just throw out some quick initial impressions.

I found the design to be snazzy and cool, if not super intuitive. The thumbstick placement threw me off, as they went the PlayStation route of having the thumbsticks adjacent to each other while the general shape, button and trigger placement were much closer to a 360 controller. I understand that they had to do this to fit everything inside the shell, and I'm starting to get used to it. The screen is clear, crisp and I love it, it reminds me of the PS Vita's OLED display.

So the MAIN thing I wanted the Shield for was PC game streaming. Not so much for on the go gaming, but so I could take my games around my house and not be confined to a desk. It's a bit of a mixed bag right now, but it IS still in beta. I can play single player games with minimal lag, I played about 10 minutes of Outlast and had no issues.. until it crashed on me. Games do seem to spontaneously crash at random intervals, I suppose it's the Shield and PC failing to sync up. Titanfall was a much different story than Outlast, I wouldn't recommend any fast paced multiplayer games unless you have blazing fast internet, and maybe not even then. I died A LOT due to lag, and usually I'm pretty decent. I will say my router is pretty standard and both my PC and my Shield were connected to the router through wifi.

Another thing, some games require you to have a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to play. This makes sense for, say, StarCraft II. But I fired up XCOM: Enemy Unknown and wasn't able to play using the controller. I'm pretty sure XCOM is optimized for controller use as it was a multiplatform release. Not sure if this is Nvidia needing to add support or just that XCOM on PC is incompatible with controllers.

I've also tried console mode on the Shield, which consists of hooking it up to an HDTV via a mini hdmi connector. I bought a Bluetooth controller to connect to the Shield and use just for this purpose. It worked quite well, I only tested Outlast this way, but it looked and played just fine (though my wife kind of hated me for it..)

I'll be testing out more games and hopefully Nvidia irons out more of the bugs soon.