Ethan, can u tell me more about this 360 controller?
I've never thought of using them so never tried to know how do they work?
I would really appreciate ur help.
Well, the 360 controller has 2 thumb sticks, each placed appropriately for your thumbs, to take control of camera and movements navigation in games. It has 2 shoulder buttons for your index finger called the Right Bumper and the Left Bumper. 2 concave trigger buttons for your middle fingers to be used and they are pressure sensitive. Apart from that, it has 4 action buttons; A,B,X & Y and a D-Pad or a directional pad.
This gamepad is extremely useful in games which have a third person view and has a open-world navigation system. Also games which rely heavily on quick combos and quick time events. It's great for FPS too, but nothing beats the mouse and keyboard combo for FPS titles. Racing games handle great with this controller too.
Take Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions for instance. This game needs quick camera navigations, as it has to adapt to the web swinging movements that Spider-Man performs. A mouse rotation turns out to be very awkward in this case. Whereas, a gamepad has full control over the rotation on a full 360 degree angle. So at any point you can promptly switch the view. You can even adjust the sensitivity to your liking.
The best part is that you get to sit back and relax while playing games. All the recent games have maximum support for this controller. All the button prompts are correctly assigned. Heck games like FIFA 2011 are ported from console in such a way that it has the 360 controller showing up in the controls menu, rather than the mouse and keyboard.
Games like PROTOTYPE, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Prince of Persia, DMC4, Assassin's Creed, Darksiders etc. are all best played with a controller. You can get the controller for like 1.2k and it would be an awesome investment. I got my 360 controller around 2 years back and now I use it to play almost all my games, yes, even FPS titles. I recently completed Black Ops using it. Get the controller dude and you will really begin to appreciate these games and the way they are meant to be played.