[Venkatesh]

I am in agreement with the list of people above. A joystick is great, and could add to the competetion "feel" of the game, but not many people have joysticks, and those who do have many varied ones. I don't know of any simple, cross-platform input layer/toolkit that supports joysticks either.

A well-done keyboard+mouse combination suffices for nearly all games today. It offers a tremendous amount of control, because the possible combinations available to the user is very high (avg of 101 keys, add in combinations of keys, mouse gestures, mouse motion, mouse butttons), and you can do more than any joystick, unless the joystick has at least 100 buttons. =)

Good luck.