Xbox 360 Wired Controller Works Just Fine with Windows

While hunting around for my Xbox 360 hard-drive, I’d noticed a number of packages containing Xbox 360 Controllers with packaging stating “For Windows”. I seem to recall most of these packages selling for $5 more than the standard wired controllers for the Xbox. Don’t be fooled! They’re supposed to be exactly the same price and the only difference is a CD containing drivers for Windows which are already on windowsupdate.com.

So, yesterday while kicking around, I thought I’d plug mine in and give it a try. Sure enough, Windows correctly identified it and installed the drivers from the internet. I was also surprised to see that a new audio device appeared in my mixer settings (and Windows brilliantly set it as my default audio device, natch). I went through the calibration screen in Game Control Settings and saw that the controller shows up with 10 buttons and flight controls. Curiously, the trigger switches map to Z-axis for use as rudders in most flight games.

I booted up FEAR and and went through the options trying to map the controls to something akin to Halo settings. No dice. Try-as-I-might, the Z-axis on the triggers would not show up as an option for triggers. Still, I live in hope that some kind soul will either write a driver to remap the controls and/or that new games will start to use these controllers as one of their defaults. I very-much expect to see the latter happen. There is probably already some utility to do the former but my laziness has prevented me from doing the required research.

This is a nice thing to see from Microsoft. I’ve been bemoaning the lack of a decent game controller for the PC for quite some time and this might open the door for a whole class of games that I don’t normally play on the PC: platformers!

Also, I would like to see some Mac drivers.

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