Guitar and Wii Controller into XNA: All Games are Wish Fulfillments

One of my favourite game designers of all time, Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Psychonauts) once hammered home during a talk at the Game Developers Conference that all games are wish fulfillments.

That probably explains why I played a lot of Guitar Hero 2 this week.  (I was having trouble with the licks 'til I remembered Strong Bad's guitar advice, and then it all came back to me.  And Uncle Bob, if you're reading this, yes I will pick up the real guitar again now.)

Did you know that you can plug the Guitar Hero X-Plorer guitar into your PC, and it shows up as a game controller (perhaps as an input device for your own music-fuelled XNA games)?

Did you also know that someone has worked out the Nintendo Wii controller's bluetooth protocol, and if you have the right Bluetooth stack, you can use it from the PC as well?  And there's a .NET library that you can use to integrate it into XNA games?

And finally, this all works in reverse too, and you can plug a USB keyboard into your XBox360 and use it to type messages, name your Pinatas, etc.