First, let me commend to you BattleGirl as being the best, nay the the only game I will allow on my Mac.

You can, quite frankly, take your Lara Croft and shove her in a crevice where the flares don't shine. Vector graphic shoot em ups have always been the bees' knees for me, and BattleGirl is the tops.

It's easier to find now - UK distributor Feral have smartly made a dual format CD out of this Mac-native game so even Mac-hostile stores might stock it.

I needed a joystick, though... you use the mouse to move around, which is fine, but the neat thing about this game is the way you can fire in any direction regardless of which way you're moving - hence the need for a joystick or gamepad as using the keyboard is hard if you have less than 8 fingers on your left hand.

So I emailed Feral a while back asking for advice - after a long wait they told me to contact the game's authors Ultra-United in the States, who never got back to me.

So come Christmas I was madly trying to find a USB joystick - John Lewis only had one insanely ugly one that looked like a control device from an alien spaceship in Blake's 7, and so I seized on the Gravis USB Gamepad Pro in Electronics Boutique. 'Works with iMac' said the sticker on the box, 'works with any game that supports InputSprockets'.

So I checked the BattleGirl documentation - 'works with any input device that supports Apple Computer Inc's Input Sprocket'.

Looking good. What could go wrong?

So I plugged in my gamepad, installed the drivers. The readme file said it doesn't work with Nanosaur or MDK which is a bit annoying, but not the end of the world as I never play those games. I rebooted, fired up BattleGirl... and the Prefs menu does not see my gamepad at all. Not a bit.

Now Gravis, bless them, have an 0800 number that some really groovy European guy answered after like one ring. He said how like he has 99 PC calls a day, and one iMac call. Well, this is your one iMac call I tell him and he chuckles and goes off to find someone who knows about Macs.

A minute later he comes back and apologises for the delay (and this is an 0800 number!) and says the tech guru is ill and might be in after 1300 CET, which is cool by me as I am also ill, and hey he sounds like such a groovy guy who really likes preddy gurls that you can't get angry with him.

Checked out the Gravis web site - nothing in the FAQ. Download the latest drivers - they turn out to be identical to the ones shipped withn the gamepad but it didn't take long and it was worth a shot.

Checked out the Feral website, and notice it hasn't changed in 6 months, parts of it still 'under construction'... ha! so I nipped over to Ultra-United's website in the States where I found the following bombshell:

We've had several reports of game pad controllers not working well or at all with battle-girl. That's partially because of the controller and partially because of the way we designed the movement control system. We use an "analog" input, which means that we can tell how fast and how far you move your joystick, mouse, trackball or whatever. This gives you more control: you can turn sharply or in a gradual, lazy arc; you can race around in the open or slow down to duck behind some cover. Unfortunately, most game pads do not support analog movement. They generally move in eight directions: either you're moving in one direction or you're not. The controller can't detect how fast you want to move or turn. We've considered adding special game pad support to the game, but we've tested it decided that it does not provide satisfactory game experience.

Well, that told me, didn't it. Except the BattleGirl documentation and box explicity says 'works with any input device that supports Apple Computer Inc's Input Sprocket' - and that just isn't true!

I take their point about using analogue controls for movement, but when it comes to firing you only have 8 directions you can shoot in, so why not, for heaven's sake, let me use the gamepad to fire from???!!!

I emailed Feral again, and this time got a speedy reply in the middle of the Millennium holiday promising they would investigate. When I pointed out the bumf on the UltraUnited web site about gamepads, they took my point and have promised me a copy of Racing Days R as compensation... which is very nice, but I'd rather they put a warning on the box that "this game does not work with gamepads"...

In the meantime, I've discovered a workaround of sorts, using a piece of $20 shareware called USB Overdrive, but it's not ideal...