Background on XIM Technology
Uploaded 8 April 2010 by OBsIV
Modded controllers are pretty douchey, right? It's a touchy subject for me since I use a mouse and keyboard adapter to play all Xbox 360 shooters. I've been using a keyboard adapter since Halo/Halo 2. The SmartJoy for the original Xbox was the bee's knees. It had multiple presets that were controlled by the keyboard function keys; it also allowed you to make dead zone adjustments for the most PC-like gaming experience possible. The SmartJoy was an unholy bitch to configure, and it needed a wired controller plugged in to synch it to the Xbox, but it made it possible for me to play Halo and Halo 2 with a keyboard and mouse. For a short while, I dominated Reibo and Matt64 on our private Halo: Combat Evolved matches. (No shields, minimal health, no invisibility, and normal gravity... If you got sneezed on, you were dead.)
After Halo 3 came out I bought Reibo an Xbox 360 for his birthday. Unfortunately, that left me out as a Bystander to Fun™, since there was no mouse/keyboard adapter for the Xbox 360 at the time. I went through a couple of half-assed adapters (the horrid XFPS versions), but all were laggy and imprecise, translating all of the limitations of the hated gamepad to the mouse and keyboard. Luckily for me, OBsIV eventually developed a nearly perfect keyboard/mouse interface for the Xbox 360: the XIM360. It's what I currently use to play all my Xbox 360 games. It's set up like this:
That setup essentially means that no matter what FPS I play, I can have the controls be almost exactly the same. The XIM360 also has finer sensitivity control, allowing you to fine tune your aiming to suit your own preferences and play style. It doesn't give you any extra speed, turbo functions, or other advantages. All it does is allow the ten-thumbed guys a break from the dizzying, head-spinning, vertiginous experience of the analog controller. (You can get more info about the current development status of the upcoming XIM3 adapter here.) Does it make a difference for a skilled player? Watch this video and decide for yourself:
The only people who will be mad are those that suck both at pads and mice (ouch), 12 year olds who cannot afford a Xim, and those with a false sense of prestige for learning a gamepad and want to leverage their skill as an advantage above everyone they can because for them being better, and not people enjoying the game, is what matters to them. 
