VGCulture - Gamepad Compatibility on PC

Gamepad compatibility for a PC game is a wonderful thing when the keyboard and mouse just doesn't cut it.  Genres such as platformers, fighting games, shoot-em-ups and Beat-em-ups just feel better with a traditional gamepad or arcade stick.  It's nice to see a lot of these games still being made and readily available on PC to play and even better to see that they're compatible with a controller.  There's just one problem with this that I've run into quite often in the past dozen games I've recently played: Only the Xbox 360 controller works.

There are plenty of games that were ported to PC that was originally on Playstation 3 yet it doesn't work with a PS3 controller.  It may be that when a game is ported to PC, it uses Microsoft's development kit to bring it over and is already scripted to use the Xbox 360 controller and the developer doesn't want to program the ability to recognize other controllers.  It might be that Microsoft has exclusivity to a game when ported over or developed on PC, especially when that game uses Games for Windows Live.  Whatever the case, it's very limiting and annoying to have only one controller out of dozens that other people have at hand be compatible with a game.  I've been pretty lucky on some games such as Street Fighter x Tekken and Sonic Generations to be able to use my fightstick and Playstation 2 controller to play those games; however, I haven't had luck with a lot of games I've gotten recently.  Sonic the Hedgehog 4, Sonic Adventure, Sacred Citadel, Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara don't recognize other controllers and have been known only to support Xbox 360 controllers.  There have been ways around this that people have used such as an Xbox 360 controller emulator that recognizes any controller as an Xbox 360 one or an application that maps keyboard keys onto a controller.  For some games, this has worked.  For others, it has not.  I'm hoping that developers realize that not all PC gamers own an Xbox 360 controller and would prefer to use a different controller on their games as it often deters many gamers from playing or even purchasing their games.  I've already purchased my games and will stubbornly play through them with my keyboard despite it not being the way I want to play them.