My friends (*** PS2-ers) brought their PS2 over to my house last night,
as well as their copy of Gran Turismo A-Spec. We wanted to give my
Thrustmaster Ferrari Force Feedback wheel a shot with the game, just to see
if it would work. I'm sure most of you know how Logitech sells that blue
wheel "for use with PS2", but since it uses USB I figured my Thrustmaster
might work too. Afterall, the U stands for universal.. :)
I moved my PC monitor out of the way, and I slapped a Commodore 64 monitor
on the desk. Ran the PS2 audio into my stereo and plugged the Thrustmaster
wheel into the USB port on the PS2. Fired up the game, and went to the
controller menu and it asked to move the wheel, so we did.. and it worked!
then it asked to calibrate the pedals and those worked too!
So we fired up the game, and amazingly enough (i guess not THAT amazing),
the shifters (both the stick AND the F1 paddles) were working perfectly for
shifting in GT3!
I've played the game a bunch of times with the PS2 gamepad, and it was fun,
sure.. but with the wheel, the game was definately more enjoyable
(obviously). The force feedback was actually pretty decent, except I did
notice that when the front wheels would lose traction completely, the wheel
would still offer the same resistance, which made it impossible to judge
when the car was losing it.. I'm not going to bother commenting on the
game's credibility, since I'm pretty sure I know where most of you stand,
and I agree.
My only point is that you can add ANY wheel (I'm guessing) into the PS2 for
this game, and turn it into a pretty darn enjoyable game even for someone
from rec.autos.simulators. There are settings in the game for "simulation"
steering and handling and all that, and they are ONLY available when a wheel
is plugged in which came as a big suprise. I judged the game a lot on the
handling with the gamepad, and I didnt' think it would translate well to a
wheel setup. But, the fact that there's a whole different steering mode for
wheel use was a really nice bonus. We also turned off any sort of traction
control in all the setup and individual car menus. A big complaint is that
there is no in-car view, and that complaint makes a whole lot more sense
when a wheel is involved, but the bumper cam thing wasn't too bad either.
The one track in the rain was pretty darn cool with the wheel..
Anyways, back to Rally Trophy 1.01! :)
Mike
http://www.racesimcentral.net/