Welcome Frasberry!

Oh yeah, we absolutely have to play online some time.

I tried driving with the mouse once, but I was awful with it. I suppose it's possible to learn to use it, though. But I learned to drive with a steering wheel, pedals and a gear stick, not with a mouse Obviously playing with a steering wheel is more immersive, but it can get quite expensive, especially if you're not satisfied with a cheap wheel. I felt like I couldn't just buy a cheap wheel with no clutch pedal or a six-speed gear stick, so I ended up buying one of the most expensive steering wheels on the market. I have been very satisfied with the purchase.

Do you play with a steering wheel, Taz? Which one? Is it possible to bind the Teamspeak push-to-talk key to a button on the steering wheel?

To anyone else who's interested: there's a free trial version with one track and three cars, and the full version costs about 30 €.

After suddenly getting really interested in racing games, I bought a steering wheel (Logitech G27) and a few racing games. I tried lots of demo versions, and found out that Live for Speed is definitely my favorite. It's an incredibly realistic simulator.

It does not have many licensed cars, or all that many cars at all, but driving the few cars it does have feels awesome. It lacks a proper single player, although you can drive against the AI drivers on any track and on any car. Unfortunately a patch from years ago broke the AI so that it doesn't know how to overtake anymore; in fact it doesn't even notice the player at all and will attempt to drive through you if you happen to be going slower on their racing line. This makes practicing against the AI very frustrating. The graphics and sounds are bad on today's standards. But that doesn't really matter.

So far I've only been driving hotlaps, shaving off seconds, then tenths of a second of my lap times. That has proven to be a lot of fun. You can customize the cars in many ways, including adjusting toe-in, tyre pressure, downforce and suspension. You don't need in-game money or anything for this. You can't add any performance-upgrading parts like turbo chargers, though.

The cars range from small hatchbacks to a real, licensed Sauber F1 formula car. The smaller, less powerful cars are easy to drive (but a bit difficult to drive very fast around the track), while the most powerful cars can be very tricky to drive in inexperienced hands. The GTR cars have a lot of downforce, which makes you change your driving style: with more speed comes more grip, so driving through a corner even faster than previously may actually be a good idea! Especially the F1 is terrifying to drive at first, and turning traction control off is insane unless you are a good driver.


If you don't have a steering wheel, there's probably very little point in playing this game. Also I can't imagine playing with a steering wheel without force feedback effects. At least with the G27 the effects feel really good. The game does support a clutch pedal and a six-speed gear stick if you have one, which makes it much more interesting and realistic.


...And it seems I've gone back to my old habit of writing a lot of text in one post. Anyway, if any other spartans play Live for Speed, it would be nice to play it together or at least talk a bit about it. I also bought Race 07 in the Race Injection pack, but I haven't installed it yet. I'm under the impression that it's one of the most realistic racing games on the market.