I was curious enough that I looked into it a bit and it sounds like the difference is negligible at this point because they added keyboard binds for partial presses in response to analog keyboards(?). Again, I haven't played TM2 or anything after, last game I played was TMUF/TMNF, so I haven't tried using them myself, however when I was looking to see what the kb/controller/wheel split was I found a lot of people saying that there isn't a strong reason to use one over the other anymore due to the new binds.

Edit: it actually makes me kinda happy to talk about this. I loved the games as a teenager, but they were too niche and I never had anyone to talk to about them.

Edit 2: damn, I remember finding the OG game at Fry's and thinking it looked like the coolest game ever and getting confused when no one else thought it was sick as fuck (everyone was into Halo and CoD, and tbf, I was into them too; but I had patrician tastes that spanned multiple genres, not like the casuals I grew up around u.u)

[–] stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 month ago

Yeah they added "action keys" that can trigger different percentage presses (20-40-60-80-100%) as a "fix" because the bobsleigh blocks they added in the new game were not keyboard friendly and they wanted to even the playing field. They eventually changed the physics to get rid of that specific need (but not completely) but they are still useful in some situations.

Download the newest game! It has a free access tier which gets you access to the first 10 tracks of the quarterly campaign and to the ranked mode. It is a bit limited but enough to see if you might get back into it. There is a decent community on reddit for the game.