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Thrustmaster T.16000M Flight Stick and H.A.W.X review
Brian Ambrozy
April 29, 2009 7:03 PM ET in Gaming
Icrontic reviews Tom Clancy’s HAWX from Icrontic.com on Vimeo.
When I got the box from Thrustmaster while I was on the road, I couldn’t wait to get home and unbox it. The moment I wrapped my hands around the flightstick, I got a grin on my face; I felt like a little kid in an airplane museum who gets to sit in a real cockpit. There are all kinds of buttons and knobs on the Thrustmaster T16 that add to the sense that you’re about to fly a serious machine.
Thrustmaster claims that the T.16000 is the “most accurate ever” at 16000×16000 sensor resolution. It has been years since I’ve laid hands on a flight stick in a simulator situation, but I can tell you that the Thrustmaster is fluid, smooth, and gives enough resistance to feel substantial and not like a video game. It also comes with extra hardware to convert it for left-handed use.
The Thrustmaster T.16 came packaged with Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X., an arcade air combat game that uses up-to-date military hardware and actual Google Maps-style satellite imagery to provide an immersive experience.
I’ve never played a modern air-combat pseudo flight sim. I was an old pro as part of the Rebel Alliance, where I was eventually promoted to Grand Admiral, but as far as games that take place on our actual Earth, I am pretty much a complete noob. I thought my Rogue Squadron experience might serve me well, but as I put the MIG-21 through its paces, I found myself wanting the weapons and versatility of the V-Wing on more than one occasion. Earthly aircraft are so… limited.
The biggest frustration for a first time player is learning how to not crash into the ground when you’re attacking ground targets. Luckily, the high technology of the planes and weapon systems leaves the aiming out of your hands; you line up the reticule and wait for a lock, then fire away. It’s getting lined up to get a lock that becomes an exercise in sadness and frustration, as your squad mates and commander continue to sigh and wonder what happened to you.
There is no comparison between playing the game with keys and mouse versus the Thrustmaster. The only way to play this game is with the Thrustmaster. Like I mentioned in my review of Psychonauts way back when, once you play it with the correct controller, the keyboard/mouse combo feels kludgy and completely inadequate.
Even though playing this game with the Thrustmaster is a really awesome experience, I found myself wishing on more than one occasion that I could adjust the sensitivity of the controls to be more responsive. The stick feels really sensitive, but it doesn’t always translate into plane movement in-game. I get the feeling that the Thrustmaster was almost specifically designed for some other game (most likely Flight Simulator X) and H.A.W.X. just sort of tacked on support for it. The game doesn’t show you customization options for the stick and the buttons; you just have to guess. I couldn’t find documentation anywhere about which buttons on the stick do what. Turns out they’re kind of important—one shoots flares when a missile is locked onto you, for example. I actually thought about labeling the buttons. It would have been great if the game had, you know, recognized the controller and at least offered some sort of instruction as to what does what. The Thrustmaster T.16000 is sold as a package with H.A.W.X. but includes “quick flight instructions” for Microsoft Flight Simulator X instead of the game it comes bundled with, which doesn’t make any sense.
The game itself is about what you would expect. It’s not a realistic flight sim by any means, and the story is a bit juvenile (it is, after all, Tom Clancy) but it’s a good weekend rip-roarer if you just want to jump in a big powerful jet and blow shit up. If you’re not at all confident, you can basically automate everything, including missile evasion. There is also a free-flight mode if you wanted to see what it was like to fly, you know, a MIG 21 over, say… Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. A common childhood fantasy, to be sure.
T.16000M Joystick & H.A.W.X bundle from Amazon
Special thanks to Randy Leipnik and Nick Maher from Semper Media Group in Oak Park, Michigan for their awesome short-notice video editing
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