It's the eternal problem with peripheral-based games: what do you do with the goddamn thing after you're done with the game?

Some console peripherals really are great for giving you a better gaming experience, or just plain making the game playable. But after you're done with the game, they get tossed in a corner and you never touch 'em again. You don't necessarily feel like you wasted money (unless you bought Steel Battalion), but do that enough times and you get a gaming graveyard. My personal gaming graveyard includes a pair of twin sticks from Virtual On, the Hori fighting stick for Xbox 360, and some retired DDR pads. Had I been richer during my more obsessed gaming era, I'd easily be able to add the Time Crisis gun, a Guitar Freaks guitar, some taiko drums and a giant freaking mech console to that list. Alas (or thankfully, depending on how you look at it), I was but a poor college student when I liked most of those games, so they were not added to my game collection, then tossed in the pile.

Some game publishers make noble efforts to incorporate their one-shot peripherals into later games, like how Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast used the fishing reel controller or Konami let you use the Guitar Freaks controller in Ephemeral Fantasia. These efforts are gimmicky and never really amount to anything, so it's usually up to us gamers to figure out how to squeeze every last bit of enjoyment out of an excessively large game peripheral.

This was a hobby of ours back when I worked at GamePro, or at least something we liked to joke about. We tried to pull out the Dreamcast fishing controller for everything possible, just to see if it could work - Soul Calibur was a particular favorite. This habit carried over to my home gaming life, and I became a surprisingly good Chu Chu Rocket player using a DDR pad, though I could only do it once before collapsing in a heap.

In that vein, I'm trying to figure out what Xbox 360 games are possible to play using the Guitar Hero controller. My first instinct was to finish off Symphony of the Night using the controller, but being unable to use the various forms means it's impossible. It wouldn't be as crippling if the game actually let you reassign buttons, but the button configuration in the Xbox Live version seems to be merely vestigial and has no effect on the actual controller settings. So Symphony is out.

Gears of War is similarly impossible without the ability to turn or aim. I can run forward and chainsaw things, but that gets old after the thirtieth death. I guess I can play Dead or Alive 4 on the guitar, but I don't really like the game that much, so that's out too.

Do you guys have any suggestions?