This isn't the game I remember.

I came to a horrifying conclusion recently. It hit me quite hard, and made me just a little depressed. I came to the devastating realisation that my beloved Gillingham Football Club will never play in the Premier League.

Now, I'm pretty sure that will come as a shock to precisely no-one, but what got me the most is that even if we had the players, ground, infrastructure, sponsors, training, management and chairman to get to the premiership, theres no way in hell that Gillingham FC can afford to compete in the premier league.

What brought it home was a line in Shortlist Magazine from Robbie Savage. He was talking about Fernando Torres' move to Chelsea and said "He looks more like a Fifteen Million pound player than a Fifty-Million pound player."

And I thought to myself "Holy hell, what has the world come to when being said you're worth fifteen million quid is meant to be a derogatory statement."

I'm pretty sure the Gills entire squad isn't valued at fifty million pounds. Hell, I'm not even sure they're valued at fifteen million pounds. Fifteen million quid goes a very long way in the third division.

And I'm still not entirely sure when football started becoming more about the money than it was about the game. Manchester City is currently having it's sponsors investigated by UEFA - the European Regulators - to see if theres any financial misconduct. In 1999, Gillingham lost to Manchester City in the division 2 playoff finals. I still find that slightly surreal given that they're now the richest club in the league.

It's like the premier league exists in another plane of existence. One where theres infinite money, and no-one bats an eyelid at players earning £200,000 a week. And everyone is asking the question "When will this bubble pop?"

A lot of the people I work with tell me that this money needs to be paid to keep the league competitive and attract talent. But I say that the world of football needs a wage cap - Let the talent come for the game, rather than the money. Let players play for the love of their club, not the size of their wallet.

Cesc Fabregas left Arsenal this week to play for Barcelona. When you read what he was saying, it was clear that he went to Barca for love of his hometown club. Back in the premier league, Wayne Rooney walked out on Everton, his hometown club, to take the big paycheck at Manchester United. Sadly, there are more players acting like Rooney than acting like Fabregas, and whilst the clubs bank balances swell and the players get bigger cars and bigger paychecks, I sit there watching the results on Saturday, knowing that my club will never be top of the top.

Because we can't afford it.

The wheel deal...*lol*

About six months ago, I picked up a Microcon MC2 Steering wheel from Argos, because - as you may have noticed - I am a fan of motorsport, and that extends to the videogame world as well. So, y'know, after having half a year to get used to the nuances of my favourite gaming accessory, I've decided to give a bit of a product review on how its turned out.

Now, there are quite a few people on sites like F1 Fanatic and The hardcore motorsport gaming sites insist that the only gaming wheels anyone should ever use are the likes of the £295 Logitech G27 and should only play a "proper racing simulator" like Rfactor.

Those are the same people who don't get that games like F1 2010 have to appear to a wider audience than the hardcore simulation crowd, and in fact have to work to appeal to the widest fanbase of F1 to recoup the money spent on the game in the first place.

I play games because I want to enjoy them. And that's precisely what I've been doing with the MC2. So, Thinking about it recently, I've subjected the MC2 to what I'm calling the "Five Game Test."

In order to see how best the wheel works, I've needed to use it on a variety of games. This being me, I have a pretty decent selection of racing games, so the ones I've chosen are:

Race Driver: GRID

F1 2010

Need For Speed: Shift

Sega Rally Online Arcade

Forza Motorsport 3.

Firstly though, a bit about the wheel itself. "But Ben," I hear you say "It's a steering wheel. It goes round and a car turns. what more do I need to know?"

Well, it's never quite that simple. The Minicon wheel, as the name suggests, is built to be smaller and a bit more portable than a wheel the size of a logitech - which is generally 1:1 scale with an actual car steering wheel. it works very well for this reason: the wheel fits very easilly on your lap, and comfortably as well. The base of the MC2 has a pair of fold out struts that can wrap either side of your legs, but to be honest I've never had any use of them - they push your knees together very tightly if your sitting on a chair, and the moulded base means you don't really need them to prevent the wheel slipping. The pedals that come with have an accelerator and a brake, but no clutch as there isn't a gear handle. It also has three suction cups on the base for if you want it to stick to a table.

Now, the wheel is wired, and has about 2 metres of cable, but it wouldn't be ideal for someone who has their lounge and xbox set up for Kinect usage as you'd probably have to sit on the floor in front of the TV. The pedals have about 4 feet of cable, so have a decent amount of space for taller people - unless your planning on driving standing up, which would be silly.

The wheel itself has a good solid feel to it, with a decent amount of tension on it's steering column, with both lightness of movement and enough resistance to make action an actual physical effort. The back of the wheel has two paddles within easy reach, and these are primarily there if you're into manual shifting. for the purposes of this review, I'll be doing just that.

Onto the games!

---F2 2010---

Car: Mclaren MP4-25

Track: Istanbul Park.

Lap Time: 1:26.733

It took a me a good while to get back into the swing of F1 2010 when I plugged the wheel in I haven't played it in quite a while and I'd completely forgotten that driving an F1 car around the track is completely different to any other kind of racing game. For a while I found myself pretty much missing every single apex on the track, and given it was my first time using a manual shift I hate to think just how many times I would have blown up a £100,000 F1 engine. When I did finally hook together a lap though, I felt absolutely brilliant. Using the wheel was intuitive and fun. Flat out through Istanbul's infamous Turn 8, I had no problem holding the wheel to the racing line and shifting up at the same time. One worry I did have was that, given the options like wing angle and engine setting are selected from the D-Pad in the centre of the wheel, it would be difficult to do all those things at once, but once I'd gotten into the habit, I selected a higher engine setting without any great difficulty. While I doubt I'm ever going to be a great threat to Seb Vettel (lets face it, who is these days), I was able to bring home a pretty decent lap time in the end.

---Need For Speed: Shift---

Car: BMW M3 GT2

Track: Brands Hatch GP

Lap Time: 1:39.099

Now, this one was certainly a bit more... Interesting. Given that it's intended as a more arcadey game anyways, NFS:Shift's cars come with a handfull of oversteer that it takes a while to get used to. I know the Brands Hatch Circuit pretty well, but it took me quite a while to hook up a half-decent lap, as I was too busy trying not to bin it into the gravel. I started with a Nissan GT-R, but it was so slidey that I decided to try with the M3 instead, and found it much better. to be honest, I've always struggled to find Grip in shift, and using the wheel didn't help much as the inherent nature of the game meant the wheel felt very sensitive. Once I'd adapted to that, however, it was pretty good - I was nailing the corners pretty well, if a little bit driftily. The earlier twitchiness did mean that out of habit I found myself shifting down a gear too far on the high speed corners, which probably accounts for my fairly slow lap time. The once fault I had with the wheel is that the Brake pedal seemed to switch suddenly between very light and very heavy with no inbetween, but again, this might just have been my heavy left foot. Once I'd gotten used to the game mechenics, it was decent fun. thank god for the runoff areas though!

---Race Driver: GRID---

Car: Chevrolet Lacetti Touring Car

Track: Donington Park National

Lap Time: None Set

Oh Dear. Oh Very Dear. The game and wheel both fell down very hard on this one. I've enjoyed GRID a lot over the year since I got it (I've only had the Xbox about 14 months) and both offline and occasionally online its been a good, punchy Arcade racer. But not with this wheel. If NFS:Shift came with a handfull of Oversteer, GRID came with both hands, legs and it's mouth full of it. I tried playing with the settings for the wheel in the games menu, I tried being less sharp with the wheel, but a typical corner went "slight turn, slight turn, slight turn, MASSIVE OVERSTEER, Spin." No matter what I did, the car simply wouldn't turn in properly to a corner, as even on front wheel drive cars like the Lacetti, the rear would step out and I'd spin the bastard. I didn't even get around a full lap of Donington before I gave up and Rage Quit. Very dissapointing.

---Forza Motorsport 3---

Car: Ford Focus ST

Track: New York Circuit

Lap Time: 1:33.771

The wheel definitely took a round back with Forza. I picked the Focus as a baseline car, and it worked pretty well, although since it wasn't race tuned, the steering felt very heavy at times, and I ran out of pedal lift before being able to brake at some of the sharper turns. The steering was still quite responsive and the gearshifts felt realistic without being clunky, and I was able to access the telemetry screen using the D-pad without any major dramas. I do have to say though, for anything like livery design and storefront on Forza, stick to the joypad - the wheel is not suited to it.

---Sega Rally Online Arcade---

Car: Skoda Fabia RS

Track: Alpine Circuit

Lap Time: 1:12:38

The wheel works, to be frank, pretty damn awesomely with this game, but to be fair, it is a very forgiving game - except when you clip a wall. Manual shifting worked as close to perfectly as you can ask, and the steering had just the right balance of sensitivity and rallying-oversteer to allow me to flick the car into the corners. I had the accelerator buried to the floor most of the time, and the brake pedal barely needed more than a dab, but I've been using the wheel both offline and online and it's won me victories in and of itself by giving me the chance to be smoother through the corners and sharper on the gearshifts. One weird bug though is that the force feedback locked on after the race and turned the wheel into a constantly vibrating presence in my lap, and I had to exit the game before it stopped.

OVERALL SCORE

4/5 games. A good score, but given that one of the games it's said to be ideal for on the box is one of the ones that let it down, make sure that you're not buying the MC2 specifically for one game, becuase if it turns out not to suit it, you're going to have a large £35 paperweight. I'd still have it over a £295 logitech paperweight any day though!

I love the 2009 formula one cars...

I'm a pretty big fan of Formula One. I'm a fan of motorsport in general, but Formula one has a special place in my heart - its one of the first sports that my wife and I truly love to watch together. We even watch the Qualifying on the Saturday before the actual race - sometimes we even find it more exciting than the actual race!

From the moment Fleetwood Mac's Bassline from The Chain starts to play, I'm hooked. I've always been a fan of Jenson Button, and the fact that his season is going so well is awesome to me.

So recently, I started following a dedicated Formula One blog, F1 Fanatic. This place seems to cotton onto a lot of the big news first, and is a lot easier to digest than my other source of F1 news, the BBC sports site.

I glanced on today, and noticed that a new article was up. The site had recently held a poll, asking what F1 cars readers felt were the best looking. I voted for the 2009 Iterations of the cars. I love the look of the new F1 cars - Unlike the technology infested things of recent years, that looked more like stubby fighter aircraft than cars, the new generation look like Racers.

Yet the fanbase have voted, overwhelmingly that the 2009 cars are the ugliest cars they've ever seen.

Seriously? I call bullshit. While I agree with a lot of what the article says - the problem of getting the cars to actually, y'know, race still hasn't been solved - I think those new cars are absolutely gorgeous. Seriously, look at the BGP-001:



Now, that is one good looking car. It looks like it can race, rather than looking like a Picasso painting has vomited all over an IndyCar. in opposition to that, the cars that were voted the best looking were the cars from the 2000's. Most notably, the cars from 2007 were prminently featured as examples:



Seriously? I mean, Jesus, nostalgia is one thing, but that car is beyond fucking ugly. I know it was an excellent piece of engineering, but aesthetically, it's far from pleasing. Even as recently as 2008, the cars were so squat and ugly that they just looked like insects to me. The latest Generation of F1 cars look like cars.

But, at the end of the day, Aesthetics isn't really the point of F1, (I really wanted to give those 2009 cars some love though) and as I said, the problems of making the cars race against each other is still there. at the highers speeds, the only place F1 seems to become a passing race sport is at the back of the grid - where the cars are so bad they have to fight for every position.

It still makes me giggle that the world Champion is in one of those poor cars. I think it will be good for Hamilton, who seemed to have the world at his feet far too quickly. In the meantime, the German Grand Prix at the Legendary Nurburgring is a week on Sunday, and once again, I'm in work for qualifying.

God... Damn.



...Tell me that shit don't look good.