Some new third party software has just been announced that will enable you play with an gamepad. Blue Orb is offering its Switcblade software that is “designed to allow gamers to play Blizzard’s massively popular World of Warcraft using an 360 controller.”

This is currently only available from Xfire the community platform. Switchblade’s first compatible game is WoW, and others are slated to follow. The good news is that it’s available today and it’s free!

As Blue Orb out it “in addition to its ‘plug and play’ pre-configured options, SwitchBlade is a highly customizable application. Experienced World of Warcraft players get extensive opportunities to reconfigure button mappings to match their unique style of play. We all know that World of Warcraft is popular, but a lot of gamers are just hooked on the console controller experience.’

It will be interesting to see if this will attract more console gamers to some of the best games. This may well help blur the divide between mouse and keyboard and gamepad. More as we get it.

By Paul Govan