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!

My secret life as a renaissance courtesan, or how I came to love Assassins Creed Multiplayer.

I've been playing an awful lot of Assassins creed Multiplayer lately. One could almost say it's my latest obsession. I've developed this nasty habit of walking up to people in the middel of a crowd and suddenly puncturing various parts of their anatomy.

It's an incredibly fun experience.

When It's done right. What I have here is a brief guide to the groups of people on Assassins creed multiplayer who will Absolutely ruin your goddamn day.

The Sprinter.

On the scale of annoyance, the sprinter ranks pretty low. To be fair, what they do is more a sign of abject incompetence than anything else. What's scary is that you see these people running around with level 20-plus status. How, is beyond me, since the sprinter is characterised by running around in bloody circles, on the same route, apparently hoping that no-one will figure out what they're doing. Right up until the point someone stabs them in the Abdomen.

Defining characteristics: Running around like a headless chicken, in the vague hope that no-one else has ever played on the same map, ever.

How to deal with them: Stand in one place, then stab them in the face, while singing the 'chariots of fire' theme tune down the microphone.

The Mountaineer

The Mountaineer was apparently born on the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, hanging from a ledge. The Mountaineer scaled the face of Everest at the age of two, and dived off the top with a hang glider. Now, The Mountaineer has turned to his greatest challenge: Assassins Creed Multiplayer. But his strange upbringing has bred into him one horrifying fear - a complete and abject horror of ever being on street level. As a consequence of this debilitating phobia, he'll spend the entirety of every round up on the rooftops, surveying his supposed kingdom, daring you to climb into His Territory.

Defining characteristics: Constant use of the free running function, despite this leaving him completely exposed at all times. Occasionally in extreme cases, spending the entire round perched on top of a jump point pretending to be Batman.

How to deal with them: Stand at street level, select the hidden gun, target them, and shoot. Then listen to the rants over the Xbox voice channel.

The CODder.

Anyone whose ever been on XBox Live Know's the CODder. They barely need mentioning. They're the guys who think all games should work exactly like the Call Of Duty Franchise. If you beat them, you're cheating. IF they beat you, they're the greatest gamer who ever lived. One of these guys swore at me for a solid minute for "Stealing his Kill." Despite the fact that he was half a map away. And it wasn't his target.

Defining characteristics: The Incessant ability to NEVER SHUT THE FUCK UP. Constant uses of variants of the word's "Fag", "Homo", "Queer," and anything else they can use to try and make themselves look tough in the overwhelming evidence of their own repressed homosexuality.

How to deal with them: Shit, if I knew how to get rid of these bell-ends, I'd have told the world by now. For the moment, I'll settle for using the mute button. On a note one of these guys declared that people who use the female characters are "Kinda Homo."

----

So, there's a small sample of the wonderful people awaiting you in Assassins creed. Of course, like any multiplayer game, there are a ton of awesome people as well. You'll meet plenty of folks who play the game properly, and actually score a metric ton of points doing so. Honestly, I've never had so much fun being Poisoned, stabbed, shot, slammed, and thrown from rooftops onto my head. I'll see you in Wanted. But you won't see me until I stab you in the neck.

Mass Effective...

I got Mass Effect 2 off my wife for christmas, and after having completed it on saturday night, I started thinking which one of the two games is actually better. Mass Effect is a truly great franchise - a sci-fi opera that is firmly building towards being one of Bioware's great acheivements.

I absolutely loved the first game. the combination of third person action and RPG spanning an entire universe was something that made me love the entire universe and it's characters. The whole series is also wonderfully ambiguous, with a firm way to play the way you want.

But which of the two games is actually better?

Well, the second game ups the action stakes. The tactical system is half arsed in the extreme, with the characters you direct to stay in a position rarely bothering to actually fucking stay there but they certainly fight well. Half the time I found myself hanging back in a support position, allowing the other two members of the party to move forward and assault the enemy. Ironically, when they were out of my control, they often tended to move better tactically and fight back enemies I hadn't even spotted yet.

In the first game, the characters tended to duck straight into cover, and just pop-up shoot at enemies. I suspect this was because of the ammo method in the first game -the weapons had infinite ammo, but tended to 'overheat', which robbed you of being able to fire for a few seconds. The tactics tended to be "pop up, short burst, short bust, overheat, duck back to cover" until you'd killed the enemies. You could use grenades to liven up the proceedings, but it was much slower paced.

In the second game, you can put a LOT more ammo down - but the ammo is limited. Rather than overheating, the guns have "Thermal Clip", that can only take so many shots before it has to be ejected. This makes the gunplay a lot more intense, and forces you to at least occasionally switch weapons. The further firepower supplied by the heavy weapons also gives you a lot more bang for your buck.

The first game used a traditional XP and Levelling RPG system, whereas the second game doles out the level points at regular intervals, forcing you think carefully about the powers and persk you choose. It works, but I did find myself missing the levelling up you get from occasional skirmishes.

On the other hand you didn't really get much incidental fighting outside of missions. Mass Effect was a lot more sprawling than it's sequel with the ability to take a wheeled vehicle - the Mako - down to a lot of the planets and roll around blowing the living shit out of stuff. Of course, one of my freinds pointed out that while Mass effect feels bigger and more open, most of the worlds are pretty much carbon copies of each other with texture changes. The illusion of freedom tended to fall apart whenever you actually went into a building, since they all had exactly the same layout with a few crates moved around. On top of that, the side missions did tend to go be essentially "Go here, shoot this."

Mass Effect 2 is a much tighter game. all of the missions have firm places within the universe and all have a plot that revolves around more than gunning down everything in a ten mile radius.

It's hard to compare the stories, since ME2's story is an extension of ME1's. But I have to say in Saren, the renegade Spectre, Mass Effect has a more compelling antagonist. Mass Effect 2 focus's far more on the wider story of Commander Shephard against the Collectors. You have the Harbringer, the voice of the Reapers - the series' overall megavillains - but other than that theres no-one to directly focus on as a villain.

So, which one is better?

Simple. The one where the refining of the formula finally pays off.

Mass effect 3.