Well, I don't play games on my PC because I want to only use console controllers, and neither does a chap with the unfortunate handle of "Virus", who has written an emulator which causes good old standards-obeying HID devices to act like horrible proprietary platform-specific controllers, for your gaming pleasure:
Download xinputemu and configure away. So you too can have a serial orb being emulated as a HID device being emulated as an X-Box controller just to play games. Good fun.
Was able to try the orb in Left 4 Dead 2 this way (for some reason it didn't see the orb as a joystick without XInput emulation). It's still clunky, but it worked, and that means a lot to me.