Before I call it a night I wanted to blog a note that I thought I'd stumbled across mention somewhere that it was possible to play a PC MMORPG with a wired Xbox 360 controller. Sure enough, I found the answer to this at http://www.switchbladegaming.com/. It targets World of Warcraft alone for now, but the controls are customizeable and LOTRO is a WoW look-alike anyway so the mappings pretty much just work. There was a little bit of learning curve, but once I realized that I need to hold the right bumper down to rotate my character I was good to go.

I didn't have time to play it much, but testing it, it seemed promising. An MMORPG is meant to be played with a keyboard handy--those are real people you're playing alongside, after all, so you should be free to chat. But I like the idea of running around as a Hobbit without a mouse when I'm sitting at my sofa.

Tomorrow or sometime this week I hope to try the Xbox controller with my PC flavor of Call of Duty 4. I had the Xbox flavor of the game as well, but I immediately sold it when I realized that the PC copy would suffice.