Simracing With A Gamepad

[Mike Sterckx]

I use a gamepad because I'm just way too lazy too break out the wheel every time i want to play a race game. My attention span (in any game) lasts hardly ever longer than an hour. I would be screwing/unscrewing the wheel several times a day.

 

[RobJLee]

Hello. Not very active here but I'd like to add my £0.02 to this discussion.

I live in the UK, North Essex to be precise. I am not wealthy, at all. Having been made redundant several times in my life has left me staring at NMW work and little besides. I live in a small rented house with my mother (who herself isn't wealthy, being 60 and having worked in a well known supermarket earning peanuts all her working life) and as a singleton I cannot afford to live in my own flat/house. I currently have a 22" monitor connected to a PC with an i5 and GTX 970 - I have had this same setup, although with a slightly different PC, for 8 years, prior to that I was gaming on a laptop.

I started sim-racing back in 2006ish. I have always used an Xbox 360 wired pad using XBCD drivers (they are better than the stock Microsoft ones).

I have raced in "leagues" online in GTR2/GTL, I have beaten people who used wheels/pedals. If anyone here knows and has raced with guys that go by the usernames on other sites of Cap7 and Geoffers, I was usually about 3-4 seconds slower than them, and in the heyday of the leagues I have raced in, where we saw 20+ drivers, I was most often a mid field runner, against guys using wheels/pedals.

In 2010ish, I had some spare cash, couple hundred £ or so, so I went out and bought a Logitech DFGT. I don't really have room for a "racing rig" but I did build myself, out of 2x1 timber and a tabletop, a fold up stand, but I can't leave it setup as I have no room to do so in my bedroom (a tiny 10x6 room), which is where I do all my gaming.

I couldn't get used to using the DFGT. Cars would massively understeer, I had 0 car control, one tap from the AI and I'd be in the scenery, and I was 10 secs or so (depending on the car) slower than with my gamepad.

I took on board loads of advice and I tried all sorts of settings in GTR2/GTL (never bothered trying it in Race07), I tried all sort of settings in the Logitech software. I just could not get the wheel to behave in a way that allowed me to be confident in using it and to be faster than when using a gamepad.

I tried the DFGT in Gran Turismo 4 on my PS2 (I bought an Xbox 360 (for Forza) instead of a PS3 when that round of consoles came out, haven't bothered with the current gen because I can't afford them). I found that I was more confident in using the wheel on that game and iirc I could beat the AI in a Lotus Elise race, but it's a PS2, so the graphics were horrendously bad on a 1080p TV/monitor and the game isn't that great anyway compared to GTR2/GTL.

On the odd occasion since then I've had a play with the wheel/pedals but they now sit under my bed unused, and have done for at least the last 2 years. To be honest I'm not even sure it works anymore (too much dust probably).

One day if I'm ever in the position of having my own home or a larger room, I would like to regularly use a wheel and pedals, but I'm not inclined to sacrifice the lap times I can achieve, albeit slow in the grand scheme of things, and chuck my gamepad, in favour of frustration and horrendously slower laps, nor stump up the cost of a new wheel/pedals (which is likely given how old and dusty my DFGT is), especially as new wheel/pedal sets are much more expensive than what I paid for my brand new DFGT some 7-8 years ago.

 

[audreycrist]

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