June 6th 2011 9:00 pm PT

What is that design atrocity ? We want a wheel. Not a horseshoe with a fishing reel glued to the inside. I poop on this ! This product is a bad idea. You have to hold it up. That is going to get very tiring after a while even if it is light. Holding up a controller like that for any reasonable gaming session is putting the body in an unnatural ergonomic position for too long.

why would consumers want another accessory when there is already a racing wheel and not to mention kinect?

would bee great if one of the top of the handles had another button for clutch… that would have been a real winner, though… didnt seem to work out that way… gotta love how they ask the community for their opinions, to help their business

Has the Xbox team considered creating haptic touch gloves that could be used with the Kinect, to open it up to the FPS market? 
The idea came to me after seeing the trailer for the new Star Wars game for Kinect.  It magnifies a flaw in the interface that could be solved by having gloves that could track your finger movements similar to how one would control a keyboard and mouse.
Used with the Kinect, it could be used to detect the subtle hand movements to move through the environment similar to PC gaming and the larger body movements could be tracked with Kinect for the dodging, kick, punching or jumping.
It would also make RTS’s viable because with the gloves it would be like having the keyboard and mouse to move and track your units, and instead of having to use the keyboard for special commands you could use the voice recognition and simple hand gestures.
It would give the user a controller without having to tie both hands up to push buttons and with haptic touch feedback, it would give the user, the sensation of physically touching something and maybe even holding it.
Just a thought, instead of making plastic wheels like the other guys are doing.

one question major…lots of complaints about the button configuration, but zooming the reverse side picture makes it appear the rb/lb are above the triggers. Can you confirm or deny??

No arcade game again? *sigh*

Sorry but this ‘wheel’ leaves me completely cold. I own the original MS wheel and yeah it’s not perfect but I’m really happy with it. It’s a definite handicap that the old and the new wheel share and that’s a lack of analog sticks. In some games like Burnout it’s quite annoying to navigate through maps with just a d-pad, not to mention it would be cool to be able to look at different angles while driving. This one’s got kinda hype design, though. I give them that.

I admit I’m worried about this one, Major.  I’m assuming it’s got some sort of gravitational sensor in it to tell when you’re turning, but my biggest problems with the original wireless wheel were the pedal angle [I have big feet, and with my heels in the heelrest hole, my ankles simply don't bend that way] and that it’d slide all around my lap when not tethered to a table…very difficult to be precise without an anchor point, and in all-out sims like Forza or F1 2010, precision is essential.  

With a custom rig [including lowering the pedal angle], the old one quickly became my controller of choice for racing games…I imagine all it really needed was some refinements, but the high price point likely didn’t help adoption.  I’m not going to write this off, but to say I’m skeptical is an understatement.

Granted, my reaction to E3 thus far has been cold in general.  Rather than helping developers harness the tech, customers are being asked to buy into making gaming more complicated.  Controller-free gaming works well for some genres [dancing, minigames, lightgun rail-shooters], but not for others.  It’s an absolutely amazing piece of tech, but it’ll see more of its potential realized by augmenting existing controllers, not replacing them.  Let us look at the apex ourselves, or check for traffic without the disorienting jump outside the car.  Let us use a voice hotkey in an RTS instead of breaking off from a fierce battle to build reinforcements.  Let us use our fingers as a cursor, instead of waiting for the cursor to get there via thumbstick.

Let us replace the complicated bits of the control scheme with something more streamlined, rather than replacing the easy bits with complicated gestures.  Refine our control methods, rather than ask us to replace them, and it’ll do wonders for the tech’s adoption.

I’d be happy to discuss further, but that’s at your discretion, not mine.

I like it in principle. It drops right in-between traditional controller and wheel. As long as it works well with no lag in response I’ll be getting one. I bought the Xbox racing wheel when it came out and hated it, peddles were sliding away, and the force feed back made for oversteer. Let alone the inconvenience of digging it out of the cupboard, setting it up then after 10 minutes switching back to the normal controller. I think you may have a hit with this. Just make it work. 

Love this! It’s more than a controller, but not a whole wheel which is a pain to set up. And a great price too.

And it DOESN’T require Kinect! Seems to be some confusion.