Welcome to Gaia! ::

Jealous of what?

hey im sad. The valve roleplays, i think, has filaly died crying . the TF2 sniper quit and i haven't heard from anyone else. BUT! im on a mission to save it! i'v been telling all gaia TF2 people i can to join, but i haven't heard from anyone yet. does anyone here want to join or help save the roleplay?

OK, sorry. It's to bad that forum died, i enjoyed it sweatdrop

oh well. it was fun while it lasted.

Played around with Big Picture again today. First I played some LIMBO and then some Super Meat Boy. Neither made me overheat like Bit.Trip did. First time I opened LIMBO, the game crashed, so I had to walk over to my laptop to click "OK" on the popup. Other than that, I didn't need to use my mouse.

Then, I pressed RT to go to Friends and I figured out you can change your online status by pressing Y. (Note: I'm still using 360 controls.)

Spent most of my time on YouTube on the browser. Typing is still awkward, but I get the feeling it will quickly become second nature if I use it enough. The typing dialogue covers the YouTube search bar on the homepage. It was awkward because you couldn't see what you had typed already. (When I did a search for "Smash Mouth" and was typing the "Mouth", I couldn't easily check whether I typoed on the "Smash".) This was not a problem on other YouTube pages, though, just the homepage.

Accidentally made a new tab, so I started playing around with tabs and stuff. If you're listening to a video in one tab and go to another tab, the video keeps playing. I'm pretty sure the PS3 browser pauses tabs you aren't in, so this is a plus for Big Picture. Also, Big Picture uses the actual YouTube page instead of a crappy site like the PS3 browser.

You switch between tabs with LB and RB, and you switch between the browser, Library/Store, and Friends with LT and RT. I occasionally found myself switching over to my games library instead of a different tab. I think Down on the D-Pad adds the current tab to your favorites list. You switch between Favorites, Current, and Recent webpages by pressing Up on the D-Pad, I think, maybe. It was kind of confusing. I'll have to look into it more later (when my brain isn't mush from playing Super Meat Boy). I think X opens up the option to close the current tab, open a new tab, or do some other stuff.

Oh, yeah, the mouse is always centered on the screen. Instead of moving the mouse around, it feels like you're moving the entire webpage while the mouse stays still, which I found annoying. You can use the right analog stick to zoom, or you can press Y to zoom in all the way. There's an annoying black flicker while the display updates. Since the mouse is always centered on the screen, it covers part of the YouTube video. You can play the video in full screen to make the mouse go away. But then you don't have a mouse, so you have to exit full screen to close ads.

Oh! You can leave the browser open when you start a game. So, if you're listening to a song, you keep listening to it while the game loads and while you play. The in-game browser is different from the out-of-game browser, though, so you can't pause the song or anything without exiting the game. You can always open the in-game web browser to listen to YouTube while playing a game, but it will close when you close the game.

I checked out Gaia on the browser. Didn't log in because I have IP Verification and didn't feel like also going to my email. Gaia seemed to lag more than normal when switching between pages in a thread. I liked how easy it was to zoom, since Wolf and I seem to use small font a lot, and I found myself zooming a lot regardless of the annoying flicker. Of course, I'm a blabber mouth, and I don't want to lose my 70+ WPM I get with Qwerty, so I'd probably never use Gaia on Big Picture for reals.

Then I logged off Steam and started babbling on here.



tl;dr: I'm pretty positive about it, even though the web browser controls can be awkward and seem unintuitive. I think it's a better browser than the PS3 has.