controllers

First let me preface this: The Thrustmaster Steering wheel has some excellent features: Adjustable steering sensitivity, button setup, and nice throttle sensitivity make it a very nice playing wheel. I've had a great time with it, until a week ago.

I had some worries about the controller from the beginning, as it made some ominous creaking noises out of the box. These concerns were confirmed last week when something snapped in the wheel during Rallisport Challenge. This has caused a steady increase in slackness in the wheel, resulting in a deadspot that makes the wheel unusable. Bummer.

Let me add, this is my first bad experience with a peripheral, I've never broken anything else in the past, including other third party wheels (Logitech<PS2> and Mad Catz <DC> are two other steering wheel peripherals used extensively). Purchase at your own risk...

I would not recommend this wheel to anyone. I could have lived with the problem where the pedals and buttons would sometimes stop working and require that the Xbox be restarted, but the thing which I found totally unacceptable was how poor a controller this actually was. Let me state at the outset that I was aware of the different sensitivity settings as well as the ability to reprogram the button assignments, and I did experiment with all the different settings. With that said, I found that on "Project Gotham Racing 2" trying to make course corrections would have no effect while you were in the 'null' area of the wheel, and as soon as you moved beyond the null area, it would immediately put you into a wall. As for times when I was cornering, the wheel did not seem linear at all and I found myself hitting the wheel limits (90º left/right) too soon so that I was left plowing into the outside edge of a corner that I had previously had no problems with while using a thumb controller. I found it very frustrating that, after many practice laps, I still wasn't able to even match, let alone beat, my times using the standard Xbox controller. All in all, a very disappointing product - I had higher expectations of something bearing the "Officially licensed for the Xbox" moniker.

The only good thing I can say about this wheel, is that it worked as soon as I plugged it in with no set up or configuration (other than the table clamp)

I tried several games with this wheel.. Apex, Gotham Racing, Need for Speed, RalliSport.. and in all the games, the results were the same.

Firstly, the wheel is too small, it needs to be a little bit bigger. Second, there is alot of play in the wheel, for racing, you want the wheel to be responsive to small movements. This is not the case. Third, the button positions could be much better, they are difficult to reach while trying to drive.

I would not suggest getting this wheel, it just doesn't do racing justice