If your hands are cramping up with an XBox controller, then you're gripping way too hard and or your hands aren't balanced in terms of muscular development.

Do a half dozen or so finger tip push ups against the wall a couple times a week and you should find that hands get more balanced and are easier to coordinate.

Especially if you're playing a lot of video games where you're pushing buttons by squeezing.

I grew up the late 80's with NES games, then Genesis, Snes, playstation etc.. First computer i had it was around 2k years and the first game i played K&M was.. Yahoo online pool!

That is to say, for me i will use a gamepad anytime if designed, sometimes configure it with xpadder for select games needing quick reaction or jump precision, and not having many menus.. Binding of Isaac, Soul Reaver for exemple.

Latest FInal Fantasy IV Reborn use the X360 and i really, really liked it!

Others : Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, latest GTA games, Saint Row 3, Skyrim, Dead Island, Alan Wake, Assassin's Creed, Darksiders..

The very one i thought working great with a gamepad is Walking Dead, can't think of playing it without actually.. Oh, Jurassic Park also!

I would suggest trying a Playstation style controller. There is something to be said for the symmerty of the design. You move your thumbs closer to use thumbsticks or apart to use the digital buttons. Plus having two triggers buttons on each side is much more convienient. The XBox controller always seemed like a practical joke to me, the made it big and ergonomic looking but you have to hold it crooked to use it.

Nope It one of these for Me!

http://www.thinkgeek.com/product/f08c/

Depends on the game really. I have two joypads, which I mainly use for third-person shooters that were designed for console, platformers, racing games and the like. I only generally use keyboard + mouse for the games that really benefit from it (first-person shooters, point 'n' click adventure).

Although I have just invested in a decent joystick for the one genre that neither KB+M nor joypad can satisfy - flight sim/space sim games.

I have a Logitech F310 gamepad which supports both old (DirectInput) and new (XInput, ie. XBox360) games. In the XInput mode, Windows seems to consider it as a XBox360 gamepad, and it seems to be 100% compatible with it in all XBox360 controller games I've tried. Good purchase.

For a GOG gamer, both modes are quite important, unless you want to use something like XPadder with many of your (DirectInput) games. For example the Prince of Persia games, some of them really need the legacy DirectInput mode, while the newest one is definitely made for XInput/XBox360 controls. So when I play those games, I need both modes for different games in the series.

What I think about gamepad controls in games?

Pros:

+ Easy to learn the controls by learn-by-doing, as you don't have to go through the whole keyboard to find all the keys. This is the case at least with newer XInput games, with older DirectInput games there is more variation, making things more complicated (ie. with newer XInput games, the default gamepad controls are usually fine; with older DirectInput games, I quite often need to remap all the PS2 style gamepad controls anyway for some reason, the default setting just feels unnatural quite often. Possibly because they were not meant only for PS2-style gamepads, but also legacy analog flightsticks).

+ Can play more easily laying back from the computer, even on a couch. No need for a desk.

+ Analog movement is useful for many games, and great for racing and most flying games.

Cons:

- Sucks for FPS games or other shooting games where you need to aim a lot, period. Mouse aim, mouse aim, mouse aim. This includes also Mirror's Edge, I much prefer the mouse+kb controls to the gamepad controls, just because of the aiming (even if there is very little shooting).

- It is pretty restricted how many fingers you can use for controls. Even with the modern gamepads with four shoulder buttons/triggers, usually your mere thumbs do like 80-90% of the controls, alone. And shoulder buttons with the index fingers, so most of your fingers are useless, just gripping the gamepad.

Sometimes this matters, as you can't obviously press two or three buttons at the same time with one thumb, or use an analog thumbstick and push the face buttons at the same time with one finger either. That actually mattered to me in games like Halo 2, where with a gamepad you couldn't practically aim while you jumped, while with kb+mouse (on the PC version), you could do that effortlessly.

Anyway, I prefer playing many games with a gamepad nowadays. I was actually surprised that even such old game like MDK, which I earlier finished with kb+mouse controls, feels now even better when I was able to map the controls to the gamepad (that took a damn sweet time, lots of trial and error before the controls felt fine. I had to put strafe keys to shoulder buttons etc., as the game does not let you map any analog axis to strafe IIRC). The game doesn't need that precise aiming, so in its case missing mouseaim doesn't matter much.