A quick-hit look at a few interesting racing accessories seen on the show floor of the 2008 Game Developers Conference.

Logitech Driving Force GT
Game: Gran Turismo 5 Prologue
Release: May 2008
Price: $149.00

The Pitch: Logitech's latest Gran Turismo-themed wheel, the Driving Force GT has been designed by Logitech with the help of GT-developer Polyphony Digital specifically for the release of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue this April. Highlights include a dial that will let you adjust a number of car settings such as front and rear brake, traction control, and anti-lock braking (among others) on the fly.

Verdict: Another solid-feeling wheel from Logitech, one that's not as hardcore as the G25 (no metal pedals? Bummer...) but certainly more affordable. The 900 degree rotation is an added bonus and the on-the-fly settings adjustments will be perfect for tweaking car settings while turning laps without having to back out to a game menu.

Question Mark: The Dual Shock 3's R3 and L3 functionality have been moved to face buttons on the front of the wheel. No word yet on what they will control, though it appears that Polyphony Digital has plans for them.

S3 Graphics/Xsight Systems
Game: rFactor F1 mod
Release: Available now (assuming you can afford it)
Price: Lots and lots of dollars

The Pitch: The most intense racing experience at GDC 08 is certainly to be found at the S3 Graphics booth. An F1 mod of the ubiquitous rFactor is running on a custom made, hydraulic-powered racing rig complete with gleaming LEDs running along the side, and a Sparco racing seat complete with a three-strap, center-buckled seat belt. Three screens in front of the driver give you a larger field of view than normal, which is a good thing considering the absurd speeds this game runs at.

Verdict: The allotted five minutes in this amazing set-up just wasn't enough. The jostling and jarring of car's movements makes those seatbelts a necessity and the game's sense of speed--powered by S3's graphics cards--make for perhaps the most intense, immersive racing PC racing experience I've ever had. If success is determined by how much I sweat during a race, consider this racing rig a big winner.

Question Mark: The rig, designed by Chris Stevenson of Hayward, CA-based Xsight Systems, was customized to the point of being ludicrously expensive. Who could afford such a thing?

DBox GP Pro-200
Game: rFactor dirt-racing mod
Release: Available Now
Price: TBD

The Pitch: Found at the Voodoo PC booth, this was another gaming chair, complete with adjustable racing seat and steering wheel and hydraulic motion that let you feel every bump and crash of the rFactor mod running on the Voodoo PC rig. Speakers mounted on the "dash" in front of you help bring the roar of the engine close to you.

Verdict: The GP Pro-200 is clearly a well-designed and comfortable chair. Unfortunately the experience was hampered by the cheap-looking and frustrating rFactor mod it was running, which featured dune buggies running over a bumpy dirt course. To to the chair's credit, every one of those huge jumps and hard landings was clearly conveyed. Unfortunately overly-floaty physics made it all too easy to flip your vehicle onto its hood; a buzz-killer for a racing game even as respected as rFactor.

Question Mark: Again, the price of course. Only the hardest of hardcore racing fans will have room for this kind of thing in their home (financially or otherwise).

A few other things were found on the show floor--including the now-ubiquitous trade-show Formula One car--but nothing else topped these three. Then again, perhaps I'm just waiting for the racing game that will let me control my car with my mind.

I didn't spend a huge amount of time on the show floor of GDC this morning, but I did drop by twice so far today, and will probably go back at least once more. Good old Greg Kasavin found me and Jason waiting to get in and we had a nice little chat about view distances in RTS games. My opinion is that Universe at War was zoomed in too far for comfort, that I liked the flexibility of Supreme Commander, but that C&C3 was pretty much always perfectly playable.

Anyway, the show floor opened up and I hit Spore first off. After writing that up, I wandered around for a bit. This is my first GDC, so it's a bit of an odd experience compared to E3 and the Tokyo Game Show. The most obvious reason for this is that it's much less focused on games themselves than it is the process of making them. (It's also a bunch smaller.) There are a lot of booths dedicated to motion capture software (complete with guy in funky suit), special cameras, AI middleware, programming books, MMO world creation software, and so on and so forth. One booth is apparently already marketing some kind of spatial 3D program for the Wii that looks suspiciously like Johnny Chung Lee's popular Youtube demonstration.

So the show floor is pretty sedate so far; it seems like most of the big news will be coming out of the press conferences and the conference sessions themselves. My favorite news so far is from the Microsoft Community press conference. Apparently you'll be able to record videos of yourself playing Ninja Gaiden 2 at each save point, but if you want to upload these replays to XBL, you'll need to be ranked among the best players of the game. I don't know how strict this ranking system will be, but hopefully it'll be fairly restrictive. If anyone has ever searched Youtube for clips of Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry, you'll have fond memories of finding clips of people playing terribly, or 10-second snippets of boring cutscenes, or whatnot. Hopefully a meritocracy will help separate the wheat from the chaff in Ninja Gaiden 2, at least for the XBLA clips. I just want to see people uploading clips of themselves killing bosses on the hardest difficult mode without getting hit at all; you can save your "ALMA IS SO HARD" clips for yourself.

A quick-hit look at a few interesting racing accessories seen on the show floor of the 2008 Game Developers Conference.

Logitech Driving Force GT
Game: Gran Turismo 5 Prologue
Release: May 2008
Price: $149.00

The Pitch: Logitech's latest Gran Turismo-themed wheel, the Driving Force GT has been designed by Logitech with the help of GT-developer Polyphony Digital specifically for the release of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue this April. Highlights include a dial that will let you adjust a number of car settings such as front and rear brake, traction control, and anti-lock braking (among others) on the fly.

Verdict: Another solid-feeling wheel from Logitech, one that's not as hardcore as the G25 (no metal pedals? Bummer...) but certainly more affordable. The 900 degree rotation is an added bonus and the on-the-fly settings adjustments will be perfect for tweaking car settings while turning laps without having to back out to a game menu.

Question Mark: The Dual Shock 3's R3 and L3 functionality have been moved to face buttons on the front of the wheel. No word yet on what they will control, though it appears that Polyphony Digital has plans for them.

S3 Graphics/Xsight Systems
Game: rFactor F1 mod
Release: Available now (assuming you can afford it)
Price: Lots and lots of dollars

The Pitch: The most intense racing experience at GDC 08 is certainly to be found at the S3 Graphics booth. An F1 mod of the ubiquitous rFactor is running on a custom made, hydraulic-powered racing rig complete with gleaming LEDs running along the side, and a Sparco racing seat complete with a three-strap, center-buckled seat belt. Three screens in front of the driver give you a larger field of view than normal, which is a good thing considering the absurd speeds this game runs at.

Verdict: The allotted five minutes in this amazing set-up just wasn't enough. The jostling and jarring of car's movements makes those seatbelts a necessity and the game's sense of speed--powered by S3's graphics cards--make for perhaps the most intense, immersive racing PC racing experience I've ever had. If success is determined by how much I sweat during a race, consider this racing rig a big winner.

Question Mark: The rig, designed by Chris Stevenson of Hayward, CA-based Xsight Systems, was customized to the point of being ludicrously expensive. Who could afford such a thing?

DBox GP Pro-200
Game: rFactor dirt-racing mod
Release: Available Now
Price: TBD

The Pitch: Found at the Voodoo PC booth, this was another gaming chair, complete with adjustable racing seat and steering wheel and hydraulic motion that let you feel every bump and crash of the rFactor mod running on the Voodoo PC rig. Speakers mounted on the "dash" in front of you help bring the roar of the engine close to you.

Verdict: The GP Pro-200 is clearly a well-designed and comfortable chair. Unfortunately the experience was hampered by the cheap-looking and frustrating rFactor mod it was running, which featured dune buggies running over a bumpy dirt course. To to the chair's credit, every one of those huge jumps and hard landings was clearly conveyed. Unfortunately overly-floaty physics made it all too easy to flip your vehicle onto its hood; a buzz-killer for a racing game even as respected as rFactor.

Question Mark: Again, the price of course. Only the hardest of hardcore racing fans will have room for this kind of thing in their home (financially or otherwise).

A few other things were found on the show floor--including the now-ubiquitous trade-show Formula One car--but nothing else topped these three. Then again, perhaps I'm just waiting for the racing game that will let me control my car with my mind.

I didn't spend a huge amount of time on the show floor of GDC this morning, but I did drop by twice so far today, and will probably go back at least once more. Good old Greg Kasavin found me and Jason waiting to get in and we had a nice little chat about view distances in RTS games. My opinion is that Universe at War was zoomed in too far for comfort, that I liked the flexibility of Supreme Commander, but that C&C3 was pretty much always perfectly playable.

Anyway, the show floor opened up and I hit Spore first off. After writing that up, I wandered around for a bit. This is my first GDC, so it's a bit of an odd experience compared to E3 and the Tokyo Game Show. The most obvious reason for this is that it's much less focused on games themselves than it is the process of making them. (It's also a bunch smaller.) There are a lot of booths dedicated to motion capture software (complete with guy in funky suit), special cameras, AI middleware, programming books, MMO world creation software, and so on and so forth. One booth is apparently already marketing some kind of spatial 3D program for the Wii that looks suspiciously like Johnny Chung Lee's popular Youtube demonstration.

So the show floor is pretty sedate so far; it seems like most of the big news will be coming out of the press conferences and the conference sessions themselves. My favorite news so far is from the Microsoft Community press conference. Apparently you'll be able to record videos of yourself playing Ninja Gaiden 2 at each save point, but if you want to upload these replays to XBL, you'll need to be ranked among the best players of the game. I don't know how strict this ranking system will be, but hopefully it'll be fairly restrictive. If anyone has ever searched Youtube for clips of Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry, you'll have fond memories of finding clips of people playing terribly, or 10-second snippets of boring cutscenes, or whatnot. Hopefully a meritocracy will help separate the wheat from the chaff in Ninja Gaiden 2, at least for the XBLA clips. I just want to see people uploading clips of themselves killing bosses on the hardest difficult mode without getting hit at all; you can save your "ALMA IS SO HARD" clips for yourself.