At this year’s I/O developer conference, Google shared its vision to “make a more helpful Google for everyone,” offering up a slew of useful features — AR in search, Live Captions for video, dark mode for Android, and a beefed-up Lens camera, for instance.
It’s a positive and empowering mission, no doubt, but what’s up with Stadia, Google’s upcoming video game streaming platform? Google had nothing new to say about it — to be fair, it’s probably saving details like pricing for E3 next month — which was kinda disappointing.
On the bright side, we got to try out the Stadia controller, and it’s quite good.
Ask any gamer, and they’ll tell you how important the controller is. A bad controller is a dealbreaker. As the way you interface with games, the controller needs to nail a number of things, such as ergonomics and button tactility. And without a console box of any kind, the Stadia controller is the only piece of hardware by which the game streaming platform will be judged.
I got to literally wrap my hands around the Stadia controller during a demo of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey running on a Pixelbook that was output to an HDTV, and I’m happy to report it’s a solid gamepad.