I Need a Gamepad

General Game-related Blathering,

I never thought I’d say that. But with the amount of games that are console ports, it seems like a gamepad for my PC would be a wise investment. It’s just that I have absolutely no idea what I should get.

So I’m open to suggestions of any kind.

Maybe some background because I assume “I need a gamepad” is about as specific as “Good morning, I would like to buy a computer”.

  • I like the PlayStation controller. I played a lot of games with them, and got used to the layout. Conversely, I am not a big fan of the X-Box layout with the weirdly out-of-place analog pad on the left hand side. So I’d very much prefer something that looked more like the former than the latter.
  • It should work with most games. (Duh) Back when I last owned a gamepad, that wasn’t an issue. A gamepad was a gamepad. Granted, that was when my gamepad looked like a Super Nintendo controller and was connected to the computer via my Sound Blaster 16’s “game port”. So times might have changed, and a PC game ported from the PlayStation might only work with some controllers, and a game ported from X-Box only with others?
  • Wireless sounds good in theory, because I have this tendency to make a mess out of cables. On the other hand, I’m worried about battery life and robustness of the wireless connection, especially with a wireless mouse already around.
  • Price is not a complete non-issue, but if you had good experiences with comfort and longevity, I’m willing to pay for that.

So please tell me if you had particularly good or bad experiences with a certain pad, and could suggest a good buy.

4 thoughts on “I Need a Gamepad”

  1. I use my XBox 360 pad. Microsoft makes a little wireless – uh, dongle? Is that what they call them? Anyway, it plugs into your USB port and then you can use the pad. I think most games these days plan around their players using their console controllers, so support for 360/PS3 is pretty standard.

    I did have one bad experience – Oblivion did not work well with the 360, something do with having to run some pretty specific setup parameters from pad > game as I recall. Every other experience has been peachy keen.

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  2. Hm, alright, I’ll see whether I can procure a PS3 controller then. Seems it works best with some special software, but I’d be willing to install that if it means not having to use the X-Box controller 😀

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  3. Pingback: I Bought A Gamepad | Random Waypoint

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