A game pad users best friend - Xbox 360 Controller Emulator

NOTICE: The latest version of the program does not work with some computers, including my own, if you encounter difficulty with the program crashing or not recognizing buttons properly, a slightly older version that should work properly can be found here.

This is not really a review, and will likely be shorter than normal. I'm just taking a quick moment to point out an insanely useful utility.

You might have noticed a lot of PC games these days recommend, or at least offer the option to use a game pad. you'll also notice a lot of these games refuse to recognize anything but an Xbox360 game pad. it's annoying situation that I've dealt with a few times myself: I have a perfectly good game pad, why can't I use it? Fortunately, for those who don't want to shell out for an Xbox pad, there's now another option.

X360ce has a very easy to use setup.

The Xbox 360 controller Emulator is a program that allows you to take any controller game pads, steering wheels, you name it. map it's buttons and analogue sticks to those off an Xbox 360 game pad, and use it to play games that might not otherwise recognize it, at least not properly.

The program is actually very easy to use, all you have to do is unzip the contents into the same directory as the executable for the game you want to use with it, run the executable to make sure everything's set up properly, save and when you next run the game? X360ce will activate on it's own to handle the rest. Or better yet, rather than performing a set up for each game, I prefer to keep a copy of the program in it's own folder, already set up so that I can simply copy its files wherever I need them.

There is a small problem in that for every game you want to use it on you need to make a new copy of the entire program, but as it's only 1.5MB large at best it's not a major issue. Also some games will refuse to play nice with it no matter what you do, though in my own experience this has been an extremely rare occurrence and the vast majority of games can use it just fine with a little tweaking at worst.

If a game doesn't work off the bat, changing some settings here tends to fix it.

If you have a non-Xbox game pad and are having trouble getting some of your games to play nice with it? Consider grabbing a copy of the program from it's official page here and throwing that at it. I've been using it for a good couple of years and outside of the newest version having issues with my PC for some strange reason, I haven't had any issues with it.