Gamepads for Racing Games = No-Brainer (So I’ve Learned)

I’ve been a PC and console gamer all my life, kicking things off with a 286 and monochrome display for one, and the Nintendo Entertainment System for the other. In all these years of juggling both, I rarely used one platform’s peripherals on the other. Sometimes it’s due to laziness, other times it just has to do with the fact that I’m happy enough with either solution.

After the Xbox 360 came out, though, I found myself in love with its gamepad. It just seemed perfect. It was more comfortable than the PlayStation gamepad design that I thought was perfect, had a lot of buttons in common-sense places and looked good as well. So, I was stoked when Microsoft released Windows software a mere month after the Xbox 360’s launch that enabled PC gamers to take advantage of the gamepad there.

For quite a while, I relied on that solution, but when the wired gamepad I had died, and the others I had being wireless, I just decided to stick to the keyboard from there-on-out. The thing is, while I love the gamepad, it didn’t feel like something I had to use, and even with racing games, I just stuck to the keyboard. I know that’s going to sound purely ridiculous to most of you, and that’s fine. Now that I’ve seen the light, I can completely understand where you are coming from.

After kicking off a new career in Dirt 3 the other night, the game felt super-difficult, and I admit that the first race took me about 25 retries to reach first place in. The second race? A much-improved 8 retries. Something just didn’t seem right, though, because I tend to be decent at racing games, and to retry the first race a countless number of times over at the game’s normal difficulty, just seemed odd. I didn’t recall hearing about the extreme difficulty in any review I looked at, so I was left a little stumped.

After mentioning the problem to a friend, he told me I should be using a gamepad, and in fact was in awe to learn that I had been using a keyboard for all of the racing games I’ve played in recent years (including about 90 hours worth of Test Drive Unlimited 2 and all recent Need for Speed titles). I had ordered a wireless receiver for the PC a couple of months ago, so I got around to setting up one of my wireless controllers with it, and then got down to testing.

After a single race, it just hit me… like a punch to the face. While it took me 25 retries in the first race to come in first, and 8 retries in the second, on the third race with the gamepad, I placed first – on the first try. Rinse and repeat for the next eight races. The game went from feeling impossible to feeling too easy, causing me to increase the difficulty. This was no coincidence… the gamepad is just a night-and-day difference to a keyboard.

In Test Drive Unlimited 2, there has been a race to plague me in the past month that I have spent about three hours on, and still have yet to compete (first place is required). With this new-found gamepad knowledge, I loaded up the same race, and completed it after about eight minutes. Once again, I was in awe at the difference an actual gamepad can make in a racing game.

I could be preaching to the choir here, but I am glad to have clued into the fact that a gamepad is just a non-option for a racing game on the PC (and perhaps other genres). The difference is just unbelievable.

I’ve surmised the reason that the gamepad is a more common-sense solution is because it offers a much higher level of control than a keyboard. On a gamepad, we have sensitive analog sticks and triggers, giving us tighter control of the car or a character in a game. You just don’t have that level of precision on a keyboard. There, it’s either 1 or 0. On a gamepad, some buttons have over 200 levels of sensitivity. Not a small difference.

If you, like me, had no idea of the true difference a gamepad could make, don’t live with the mistake too much longer.