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Cheap PC Game Controller?
Hey all, I was hoping to pick up a couple gamepads to use on my PC, to play those titles that just don't work well with mouse+keyboard. I figured that with the release of the XBOX ONE and the fact you can't natively use the old 360 controllers on it, that those old 360 controllers would be super cheap, as many people upgrade systems and the 360 and its controllers become obsolete.
However, I haven't had any luck finding good deals on wired 360 controllers. Prices seem basically the same as they have always been, even before the XBOX ONE. Any tips for places to look, etc.?
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I considered a Logitec one since I like their products but I read about having to set up keybindings etc .like the poster above mentioned so I went with the Microsoft XBox for PC controller that came with a wireless USB dongle. Works great. I think they have come down in price a lot as well.
Edit: If you already have a wireless 360 controller or can find one. you can get a wireless adapter for the PC for about $15
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Wired 360 is still the best bet - just have to get the driver from Microsoft. The wireless ones work fine with the PC dongle, I can confirm that, but it's an extra $15 plus you have to deal with batteries/recharging - but if you want wireless or already have the controllers, it works.
XBone one controllers supposedly have a driver out now, I don't have one, but supposedly it works.
PS3/PS4 controllers work as well, with a third party non-official driver. PS4 official drivers are supposedly in the works.
That being said, there are no shortage of USB PC controllers out there, like the Logitech ones. A lot of them will use Xpadder or something similar though.
I've used Logitech gamepads for several years. I'm on my fourth one now because the first three broke. But don't let that dissuade you; a $10 gamepad that works well for several hundred hours and then breaks had a good life.
Logitech has software to map gamepad buttons to keyboard keys, and it's very much built for their gamepads and works well. It will let you have different mappings for different games that it detects by the program executable, but updates and launchers sometimes break that functionality. It also lets you have one mapping that applies to everything, and it's simple to switch which mapping you want.
Logitech's software lets you bind one button to a combination of keys or a sequence of keys (e.g., when pressing this button, interpret it as this key then that key then some other key all very quickly). It also lets you make pressing one button cycle through keys, so you can press one button repeatedly and have it count as a 1 on the first press, 2 on the second, 3 on the third, then back to 1. I haven't found any use for that, though. Also important is that it lets you designate one button as SHIFT (not the keyboard key!), and the rest of the buttons can have one meaning when SHIFT is held down and an entirely different meaning when SHIFT is not held down. That, plus using shift, control, or alt, lets you have plenty of combinations of keys to control whatever you need.
Yeah, you do have to completely redo controls for every new game you play. But that's something you should do with most games in just about any control scheme, to get controls that are comfortable to you.
Also, if you're going to use a gamepad, action combat based on dodging works a lot better than action combat based on aiming. Gamepads make it very hard to aim well, but considerably easier to dodge than keyboard+mouse.