I was reading Jeff’s blog post on fad controllers and read a comment thread where people shamed some dudes who were playing games on keyboards. Here’s my take.
Controllers –joystick, gamepad, keyboard, Ouija board- are like musical instruments. You have your preference and you can play any music with it but probably, it fits some genre better than others. With the right skills though, you can do whatever you want: beating Super Meat Boy on a keyboard is a bit like covering some early Pantera on a saxophone, that sounds risky. But if you’re good, you probably can do that. And you’re awesome.
Controller choice doesn’t matter so much. People are having fun? You good. What developers need to do is test different input and make sure they’re all decent, instead of polishing one input scheme to death while forgetting about the others. And of course, a re-mapping tool should be standard these days.
I miss the Wiimote. I could play golf and physics-based games for the next five decades with it without any issues.