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yrevalBack in June, I posted on Cohost about #SplashWaveRacing, a retro racing game challenge organised by sharkabytes.bsky.social that I had recently played in. Since then, two things have happened:
1) Further #SplashWaveRacings took place over the course of the summer
2) As hinted at in the post, I purchased a Logitech G29 last month - a popular entry-level wheel for sim racing.
I've played plenty of Assetto Corsa and Gran Turismo 7 on the wheel, but recently - inspired by the 30th anniversary of the Playstation, and with it the PS1 port of Ridge Racer - I had an idea; how would it fare with games from that era? I decided to revisit the PS1 #SplashWaveRacing challenges with the wheel, and compare how I did with the times I achieved on a standard Xbox joypad.
The setup
I played these games on the Duckstation emulator, with the following settings:
In-game, I removed the dead zones and set the steering range to the maximum.
I had a difficult time getting Duckstation to recognise the wheel itself; the pedals and all the other controls worked just fine, but at first, whenever I steered to the left the car turned right, and when I steered to the right nothing happened. After a few attempts to rectify this, Duckstation stopped accepting any kind of steering input. Just when I was about to give up on the idea of this experiment, the steering suddenly started working properly; unfortunately, I couldn't tell you exactly what I did to get it working. It appears that when you're setting the steering controls, you have to do it in a very precise way.
With that issue solved, it was time to proceed with the experiment. I attempted the following three challenges for about half an hour each, and compared my fastest times on the wheel with the fastest times I had achieved on the controller (which were, to be fair, the result of multiple hours of practice over the course of a week. This was not a particularly scientific experiment, is what I'm saying):
Ridge Racer: Fastest lap using the F/A Racing car in the Mid-level race
Ridge Racer Type 4: Fastest lap using the Preset D3 car on Edge of the Earth
Wip3out: Fastest total time (2 laps) using the Vector-class Auricom ship on Mega Mall
Ridge Racer
Controller time: 44.928
Wheel time: 47.807 (+2.879s, +6.41%)
This definitely didn't feel as good with the wheel. The main issue was that I found it surprisingly difficult to initiate a drift - it seemed like I need to wrench the wheel to get a drift going.
To go significantly faster than this, I would have needed to make use of a glitch, which only exists in the PS version, called "silent drifting", in which the car speeds up when you are drifting at a very narrow angle - it's called that because, if you're doing it properly, you won't be able to hear the tyres squeal. You can see it a few times in my 44.928 run - the car cannot normally go faster than 131mph, but I manage to get it to nearly 150 on a few occasions.
And then there are those who have thoroughly mastered the technique:
Try as I might, I couldn't replicate the glitch on the wheel. On one hand, you would think that the more precise steering afforded by the wheel would make this much easier; on the other, it requires very rapid inputs which are much more difficult to replicate on the wheel and pedals.
Ridge Racer Type 4
Controller time: 1:01.404
Wheel time: 1:01.729 (+0.325s, +0.53%)
This felt much better, and it showed in the time achieved. With a bit more practice, I think I could have improved on the controller time. Drifting still feels somewhat different - although I'm not sure it's any better or worse - from on the controller. There's not much else to say other than that this game is still every bit the masterpiece on wheel that it is on the PS1 controller or neGcon (and, although I've never used one, probably quite a bit better than on the Jogcon).
Wip3out
Controller time: 1:46.64
Wheel time: 1:45.60 (-1.04s, -0.98%)
Wip3out doesn't seem like the kind of game that would play that well on wheel - but once you try it, it becomes clear that the game heavily rewards smooth steering inputs. What's more, this run was the result of only about ten minutes of practice with the wheel, as opposed to 30 minutes on the other games. Despite the obvious mistakes, such as the pit lane mishap on lap 1 (it's a longer distance than the actual track, but the turning radius isn't as tight and you're able to deploy more Hyperthrust due to the extra shield energy you absorb - in fact, hitting the wall meant I spent more time in the pit lane, which recharged more of my shield, which meant that I made up most of the time lost from hitting the wall thanks to the extra Hyperthrust I was able to deploy), I was over a second faster with the wheel.
In summary: it's a mixed bag. Some games don't play as well with a wheel (at least not with just half an hour of practice), some play just as well as with a controller, and some play better. A bigger sample size is needed before I can say whether or not it's likely to be worth going to the trouble of setting up a wheel for your favourite PS1 racing game.
Until next time...
1) Further #SplashWaveRacings took place over the course of the summer
2) As hinted at in the post, I purchased a Logitech G29 last month - a popular entry-level wheel for sim racing.
I've played plenty of Assetto Corsa and Gran Turismo 7 on the wheel, but recently - inspired by the 30th anniversary of the Playstation, and with it the PS1 port of Ridge Racer - I had an idea; how would it fare with games from that era? I decided to revisit the PS1 #SplashWaveRacing challenges with the wheel, and compare how I did with the times I achieved on a standard Xbox joypad.
The setup
I played these games on the Duckstation emulator, with the following settings:
In-game, I removed the dead zones and set the steering range to the maximum.
I had a difficult time getting Duckstation to recognise the wheel itself; the pedals and all the other controls worked just fine, but at first, whenever I steered to the left the car turned right, and when I steered to the right nothing happened. After a few attempts to rectify this, Duckstation stopped accepting any kind of steering input. Just when I was about to give up on the idea of this experiment, the steering suddenly started working properly; unfortunately, I couldn't tell you exactly what I did to get it working. It appears that when you're setting the steering controls, you have to do it in a very precise way.
With that issue solved, it was time to proceed with the experiment. I attempted the following three challenges for about half an hour each, and compared my fastest times on the wheel with the fastest times I had achieved on the controller (which were, to be fair, the result of multiple hours of practice over the course of a week. This was not a particularly scientific experiment, is what I'm saying):
Ridge Racer: Fastest lap using the F/A Racing car in the Mid-level race
Ridge Racer Type 4: Fastest lap using the Preset D3 car on Edge of the Earth
Wip3out: Fastest total time (2 laps) using the Vector-class Auricom ship on Mega Mall
Ridge Racer
Controller time: 44.928
Wheel time: 47.807 (+2.879s, +6.41%)
This definitely didn't feel as good with the wheel. The main issue was that I found it surprisingly difficult to initiate a drift - it seemed like I need to wrench the wheel to get a drift going.
To go significantly faster than this, I would have needed to make use of a glitch, which only exists in the PS version, called "silent drifting", in which the car speeds up when you are drifting at a very narrow angle - it's called that because, if you're doing it properly, you won't be able to hear the tyres squeal. You can see it a few times in my 44.928 run - the car cannot normally go faster than 131mph, but I manage to get it to nearly 150 on a few occasions.
And then there are those who have thoroughly mastered the technique:
Try as I might, I couldn't replicate the glitch on the wheel. On one hand, you would think that the more precise steering afforded by the wheel would make this much easier; on the other, it requires very rapid inputs which are much more difficult to replicate on the wheel and pedals.
Ridge Racer Type 4
Controller time: 1:01.404
Wheel time: 1:01.729 (+0.325s, +0.53%)
This felt much better, and it showed in the time achieved. With a bit more practice, I think I could have improved on the controller time. Drifting still feels somewhat different - although I'm not sure it's any better or worse - from on the controller. There's not much else to say other than that this game is still every bit the masterpiece on wheel that it is on the PS1 controller or neGcon (and, although I've never used one, probably quite a bit better than on the Jogcon).
Wip3out
Controller time: 1:46.64
Wheel time: 1:45.60 (-1.04s, -0.98%)
Wip3out doesn't seem like the kind of game that would play that well on wheel - but once you try it, it becomes clear that the game heavily rewards smooth steering inputs. What's more, this run was the result of only about ten minutes of practice with the wheel, as opposed to 30 minutes on the other games. Despite the obvious mistakes, such as the pit lane mishap on lap 1 (it's a longer distance than the actual track, but the turning radius isn't as tight and you're able to deploy more Hyperthrust due to the extra shield energy you absorb - in fact, hitting the wall meant I spent more time in the pit lane, which recharged more of my shield, which meant that I made up most of the time lost from hitting the wall thanks to the extra Hyperthrust I was able to deploy), I was over a second faster with the wheel.
In summary: it's a mixed bag. Some games don't play as well with a wheel (at least not with just half an hour of practice), some play just as well as with a controller, and some play better. A bigger sample size is needed before I can say whether or not it's likely to be worth going to the trouble of setting up a wheel for your favourite PS1 racing game.
Until next time...
