Forum Overview :: Gran Turismo 5 :: Steering wheels are awesome, but not necessary.

[quote name="Jerry Whorebach"]The only reason I don't have a wheel is because I live in a one-room apartment and it would be too sad if anyone saw it. "Oh look the autistic man is going to sit in his chair and drive away to fantasy land" they would think. Well the joke's on them because I don't EVEN need a wheel to get to fantasy land. All I need is my imagination and a TV and a games console and a game and a regular controller. Besides, regular controllers are pretty good these days, at least for racing games. An analog stick and triggers will never offer the same range of motion as a wheel and pedals, but anyone who's spent enough time on the hardware should be able to steer and brake with as much precision as they can reasonably utilize. Think of it this way: if you can simulate the act of playing world-class basketball with only a gamepad, how laughably easy must it be to simulate turning a wheel while squashing a pedal? Which brings me to the terrible secret of Gran Turismo-type racers: they're not really very much like driving a car at all. Like all great sports games (or at least the wildly popular ones), they're games first, pornography second, and simulations a distant third. They offer some of the deepest and most rewarding gameplay you'll find in a multi-million-selling blockbuster, but they also offer enough hours of "content", gorgeous graphics, and sufficiently cynical reward mechanisms (YOU WON <i>A NEW CAR!</i>) that I suspect the majority of people who buy them never even feel the inclination to get good at them. (Nothing is more disheartening to me as a gamer or a human being than to hear a professional reviewer say he put twenty hours or more into one of these games without ever turning off the racing line.) Gran Turismo is a competitive game for people who like competing with themselves - an old-fashioned arcade experience where your score is your lap time, and you can always better your time if only you'd try a little harder. It's also a relationship sim for people who fantasize about Nissans, a collect 'em up for people too old or boring to play with Pokemon, and an incremental number incrementer for the really hopeless cases who can't have any fun unless they're making "progress". That's called crossover appeal, baby![/quote]