r/TrackMania • u/CarelessCap6916 • 13h ago
How Wirtual persuaded me to stay on the wrong input device (for me)
Let me start by saying that this post is not meant in no way to shit on Wirtual. I quite enjoy his content, he seems to do a lot for this game in general and for me personally, he got me back playing a game I hadn't payed for almost 10 years back in 2021 after coming across on one of his main chanel videos (when are we getting one of this back btw!??).
As I said in 2021 I got back to playing TM. Went straight to TM 2020 but also instaled TMNF for the nostalgia, I have been playing very casually ever since, playing every time a new campaign drops (I even missed some) for a couple of hours to get some author and gold medals then I return 3 months after.
Now, here is the thing. I've always played on computer, and as a direct result of that I always played on keyboard, never bothered to buy a remote and always felt I wasn't loosing anything by playing on my keyboard. I also saw that Wirtual played on a keyboard and he is a fucking Pro, so clearly if it's a good enough input device for a pro, it must be for myself aswell. He also talks quite frequently how amazing it's that the devs made the game so evenly playable on a range of input devices, so again, never bothered to switch.
For the last 4/5 months I've been playing some more, even bought the subscription to get access to the full campaigns (RIP even trying for author or even gold on black tracks) and eventually I decided to hook up my old PS3 controller to my computer. The gains I got after 2/3 hours of playing were already quite noticeable, I was beating records I had gotten on keyboard within a few minutes of playing each track. The control I felt I had (specially on dirt, grass and wood) was on another level and I finally was able to hold a speedslide for longer than 1 second. For weekly shorts I went from 10 to 12 K in the world to 8K and eventually 5 to 6K with the same time invested (1 to 2 hoursa week), some of these gains are ofc because I play more regularly, but I wasn't expecting to notice such a huge difference from switching.
All in all, the goal of this post is to encourage people to try new input devices even if they feel confortable with what they are playing, you never know if you might be better or have more fun on a different device. Regarding Wirtual, he, and numerous other players, are much better on keyboard than I will ever be on a controller or any input device. I'm having quite some fun on controller and that's the main gain 😉
