Accessories

I LOVE the IDEA
I love racing games and have played for years using standard controllers. I decided to try a sterring wheel and determine if it would be worth the trouble.

I am still not sold. This wheel and pedal setup is fine and works well for the money. There is slack in the wheel between where is actually communicates your movement to the xbox and that is translated into your game, but you learn to deal with that issue.

The biggest reason for the 4-star rating is lack of games that are playable with a wheel. Unless you are into NASCAR or some other paved track type game, it is not as much fun as I hoped. I guess I was hoping for too much and got what everyone else has come to expect.

Either way, unless I am playing Burnout Paradise or Nascar (not much fun either) or Grid, this is not for me and I will stick with my controller

Great Wheel
The wheel works great with PGR3, Forza2 and Dirt. It does take some getting used to. You really have to work the pedals to make the turns, but with a little practice ou will get it. I have always loved racing games, but never had a wheel. I got the MC wheel and knew there would be a learning curve. It took me a couple days to get the hang of it, but I am now better with the wheel than I ever was with a controller.

Known problem
I've got this wheel and the voice function does not work. Unfortunately Madcatz's response is "we know about it but because it's a problem with code and/or products provided to us by MS we can't fix it for you and by the way we will not refund your money". They did say that sometimes they get wheels from China that have been refurbished and the problem is corrected (which means they know how to fix it they just don't want to spend the money fixing all the bad wheels out there) so if you want to send your wheel in they will replace it with one of these wheels but they don't know how long it will take (they implied it would be months). I'm very unhappy with them and will never buy a Madcatz product again.

Wheel good, communicator connection bad
I've had two of these wheels and both had the same problem -- the communicator connection was bad. In races on PGR3, I would get complaints about feedback and a bad connection all the time. So I stopped using the communicator when I raced, which hurt the fun of the game. The wheel itself is fine and I actually prefer it to the MS wheel, which was nearly 3 times as expensive. But the communicator problem is serious, and I've heard other owners of the Mad Catz wheel complain about the same problem. I haven't used this wheel in six months and I'm hoping Mad Catz got enough complaints that they finally did something to correct it. Too bad

Broke after 1 hour of play
Christmas day, wheel handed off to my 8 year nephew to play with Project Gotham Racing. After one hour the pin from the brake pedal fell out and, from what I could tell of the design of the pedals, I couldn't see how this could last more than a day or two.