In moments of road rage, I could feel the back of the console lift a little.Īt $140 for the wheel and pedals (an RS Shifter with eight gears runs an additional $60), the Force definitely gives you the best force feedback for the price.Sidewinder Two cumbersome flywheels tighten the console to the desk. The only downside to this wheel was the locking mechanism. While our wheel arrived with an RS Shifter, the Porsche game didn't support it so we never got to test it. And a crash at 60 mph felt different from bumping another car on a curve. (You can adjust the force in some games.)ĭriving on gravel road shoulders gave the wheel and console one heck of a rumble. The force feedback in the RS system was so strong that my computer desk - including printer, scanner, USB hub and all - shook as the car waited at the starting line before the race. While I never got the USB connection to work with this wheel, I had no problem hooking it to a serial port. You know you're in for a sweet driving experience when you take the Force RS Racing System out of the box and see the synthetic leather on the steering wheel and heavy-duty accelerator and brake pedals that look as if they belong on an arcade game down at ESPN Zone. The best wheel in this bunch came from Act Labs. My PC was powered by a 450 MHz Pentium II chip with 192 megabytes of RAM, an nVidia TNT II 32-megabyte graphics card, and a 10-gigabyte hard drive.Use the Force This $39.95 game is typical of many racing titles, which require at least a 200 MHz Pentium computer. (Yeah, it's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.) Two of the units had force feedback, which means the wheel and console shake, rattle and jolt the driver in response to speed, road conditions and crashes.įor test purposes we used Electronic Arts' superb "Need For Speed Porsche Unleashed" simulation, which provides hours of fun with 80 models of Porsches on linear and circuit tracks. I tested four of these top-drawer steering wheel and pedal assemblies to see which provided the most thrilling racing experience. While some racing wheels can be had for $40 or less, these tend to be cheap plastic knockoffs of the better models that start at $60 or so. And once you drive in a PC game with a 10-inch racing wheel, you'll swear off your joystick forever. Connected to a computer's game port, serial port or Universal Serial Bus, the wheels and pedals tend to be easy to get up and running.
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