Thrustmaster T.16000M FCS HOTAS Review
Elite Dangerous
Published: 6th December 2016 | Source: Thrustmaster | Price: £175 |
Elite Dangerous
Elite Dangerous has a difficult birth. What people expect a modern game to be seems to be unrelated to what you would expect an Elite title to be. If you loved the original Elite, you'll love this. Sure the Guardians update has been a bug-ridden mess that broke many elements to the game, it's still the best space experience this side of joining NASA.
Thrustmaster provide a preset configuration on their website, although we found that it combined the throttle and stick into a single device and that gave issues. So for our testing we just ran it as the regular 'Windows Gaming Devices' pair of peripherals. Whereas jet fighters, and indeed as we saw on the earlier page, WW2 era prop fighters, can require a dizzying amount of controls, Elite is designed to be fully playable on a 360 Pad, and so with the T.16000M FCS you can assign everything you could ever need and have enough left over to be able to assign stuff you hardly ever use. The analogue stick on the back of the throttle body was perfect for docking thrusters, and about the only minor issue having transferred from the HOTAS X is that you need to hold a modifier button to use reverse thrusters. Without an obvious centre mark on the thruster slider using it as both forwards and back would require a deadzone. And yes, since you ask, the penultimate picture is me showing off.
Most Recent Comments
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QuoteIt's a shame the throttle isn't reversible for lefties but if you're using the thumb hatswitch for lateral and vertical thrust and the toggle rudder for yaw control using your right hand for pitch and roll is probably pretty convenient anyways.
I've often wondered about Airbus flight decks with the stick on the left for the pilot and on the right for first officer. I wonder if the flight crew always sit that way or whether the captain calls shotgun.
It's interesting there seem to be two schools of thought on space sim control - depending on whether you have a traditional flight control upbringing (pitch/roll) or console style (pitch/yaw) as the main controls. Like anything I guess you adapt pretty quickly but I can't get out of the habit of rolling my ship before pitching in the direction I want. Must be less efficient in combat you'd think. The Last Starfighter had it right - dual sticks for gunnery all the way.
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Originally Posted by AlienALX
Wow, that's a lot of dough. Excuse my ignorance (and tiredness leading to me just skimming the review) but what sort of games does this work well with? Just wondered, 'cause the last stick I used was the MS Feedback one. And it was very good I must say
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Really is a neat little stick and throttle for the money.Quote
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