Depends entirely on the genre of game.
FPS... mouse and keyboard. Gamepads with analogue sticks have no precision without some kind of autoaim, and I would never trust autoaim.
RPG... depends. If it's a real RPG like Final Fantasy, a gamepad is the way to go. (A retro controller with a d-pad and no analogue sticks, naturally.) But, if it's some kind of click-and-slash like Diablo or Baldur's Gate, there's not much choice other than to use a mouse.
Fighters and 2D Platformers, along with pretty much all kinds of arcade games and shoot-'em-ups, demand a joystick. End of story.
3D Platformers are where modern gamepads with dual analogue sticks find their usefulness. Basically, whenever it's more important to swing the camera around the player character than it is to aim his guns, you want that right-hand analogue stick. The question, of course, is: which style of gamepad is the best?
The old XBOX pad is too unwieldy, and with certain buttons not easily reached. (I'm looking at you, Black and White buttons!)
The Gamecube pad fits the hands very nicely, and the big A button makes it ideal for simple games... but the X and Y buttons, C stick, and D pad are all hard to reach, and the L and R buttons have too much give to easily depress fully, so it's not a great pad for anything more complex than MarioKart or Smash Bros.
The good old PSX dualshock is certainly the paragon of the spartan design, lacking all superfluous affectation, and it must do the job well if it's spawned so many knockoffs (Logitech, anybody?) and hasn't changed since 1998.
But the award for sheer ergonomic perfection has to go to the 360 controller. Much better size, heft, and hand-fit than its predecessor, to say nothing of button placement (the A/B/X/Y on the face hearkens pleasantly back to the efficiency of the SNES controller), and both shoulder buttons and analogue triggers that depress easily. And, as if it weren't already great, it uses a PC-compatible USB port. Kind like the old days, when you could plug your Sega Genesis pad into the same universal 9-pin joystick port used by Atari, Commodore, Amiga, etc.
FPS... mouse and keyboard. Gamepads with analogue sticks have no precision without some kind of autoaim, and I would never trust autoaim.
RPG... depends. If it's a real RPG like Final Fantasy, a gamepad is the way to go. (A retro controller with a d-pad and no analogue sticks, naturally.) But, if it's some kind of click-and-slash like Diablo or Baldur's Gate, there's not much choice other than to use a mouse.
Fighters and 2D Platformers, along with pretty much all kinds of arcade games and shoot-'em-ups, demand a joystick. End of story.
3D Platformers are where modern gamepads with dual analogue sticks find their usefulness. Basically, whenever it's more important to swing the camera around the player character than it is to aim his guns, you want that right-hand analogue stick. The question, of course, is: which style of gamepad is the best?
The old XBOX pad is too unwieldy, and with certain buttons not easily reached. (I'm looking at you, Black and White buttons!)
The Gamecube pad fits the hands very nicely, and the big A button makes it ideal for simple games... but the X and Y buttons, C stick, and D pad are all hard to reach, and the L and R buttons have too much give to easily depress fully, so it's not a great pad for anything more complex than MarioKart or Smash Bros.
The good old PSX dualshock is certainly the paragon of the spartan design, lacking all superfluous affectation, and it must do the job well if it's spawned so many knockoffs (Logitech, anybody?) and hasn't changed since 1998.
But the award for sheer ergonomic perfection has to go to the 360 controller. Much better size, heft, and hand-fit than its predecessor, to say nothing of button placement (the A/B/X/Y on the face hearkens pleasantly back to the efficiency of the SNES controller), and both shoulder buttons and analogue triggers that depress easily. And, as if it weren't already great, it uses a PC-compatible USB port. Kind like the old days, when you could plug your Sega Genesis pad into the same universal 9-pin joystick port used by Atari, Commodore, Amiga, etc.
