The Logitech DriveFX had to go. Piece of crap. I plunked down an extra $50 ($100 total) when I returned it to get the Microsoft Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel. The difference is incredible.

The Good:

This product is very well designed, and very well put together. It feels sturdy and solid. The rumble is very strong. The force feedback is also very strong. The buttons aren’t cheap. The pedals have an empty area that your heel goes in. At first it just looks like it’s there to save plastic, or to look cool, but it actually serves a purpose. Because it goes behind your foot it’s not possible for it to slide away from you because it would always catch on your heel. When you get slammed off in one direction you have to fight the wheel to turn back the other way.

The Mediocre:

The X,Y,A,B Buttons are reachable without difficulty, but they could be better. It’s a hard problem to solve though because when you go into a hard turn you still need to be able to reach them.

The Bad:

It doesn’t have equivalents for all the buttons. There’s no analog sticks and no trigger buttons. They advertise that you can remap some of the functionality, and that’s true, but the ability to remap is supported at the game level not in the OS.

The Burnout:

I got this because I freaking love Burnout Paradise. Unfortunately EA Games doesn’t support any controllers on the 360 other than the default. Since there aren’t any analog sticks you can’t navigate the map, and some maneuvering (controlling rolls for example) is harder than it would otherwise be. It does make your driving much smoother, but on the other hand sometimes when you bounce off of something (another car, a side-rail, etc.) the force feedback will drive you hard to one side and you’ll have to fight it to get it back to the other direction, then over-compensate, and reverse the process in decreasing sine-wave like pattern. Maybe this is realistic (I wouldn’t know), but it is trickier.

In Conclusion:

If you like racing games this is a really great product. If you only want to use it on racing games made by EA Games you’ll not be getting the full potential of it, but you may still find it worth it. I do.

P.S. If you set a new record on each of the roads you get the Carbon Ikusa GT which has 8 speed 7 boost and 5 strength along with the Speed King achievement. Unfortunately there’s no achievement for holding the fastest time on all the roads simultaneously, which yours truly happens to have at the time of this writing.