Getting our hands dirty with the Nvidia Shield Android TV set-top box

My whole family gathered around the television recently to play a game on the Nvidia Shield set-top box, a beefy Android machine with a high-end processor that is capable of running some of the graphically intense games made. Our first choice: Pac-Man. We downloaded the beloved game from my childhood in a minute or so over our cable modem connection and then launched it on a big-screen TV. Soon, we were laughing and competing to get the high score.

The Shield set-top box, which goes on sale today for $200 (for 16GB storage) or $300 (for 500GB), is a high-end living room entertainment box with 30 times the performance of competing devices. But it’s also a flagship box for Google’s Android TV and a nice introductory all-in-one box for a gamer and his or her family. We found that the draw of the box wasn’t the high-end games like Half-Life 2 but the more casual, broader audience titles like Pac-Man that the whole family can play. We don’t do this very often as most of the time everyone is playing something on one of their own screens, like a computer or a smartphone. But getting in front of the TV makes the gaming and entertainment experience a lot more social.