Cool foot pedals...

These foot pedals can be used to activate mouse clicks or other keyboard actions. This can be a nice thing for people who have carpel-tunnel, artheritis or other conditions that make using the mouse difficult or painful.

It also gives me an idea for a game controller that would be good for FPS-type games. One of the big problems I have with playing games like Halo on a console is that crouching and jumping are really hard to coordinate on the controller. When I play those games on the PC, I use a combination of mouse and joystick (not keyboard, cause keyboards are right-hand biased, and I am left handed...and fat-fingered, which is really a greater problem in the long run). I use the mouse for 'look'/turning control, and the joystick for forward/backward/strafe control. The mouse buttons I used for crouch and jump, and the joystick buttons for firing and weapon cycling.

On the XBox, I want the two triggers for...well...triggers. Halo2 lets you wield two weapons simultaneously and fire them independently, so that basically ties up two fingers and two buttons. Look and movement occupy the thumbs. That means that in order for me to crouch or jump...and really you need these to be effective in any kind of human-vs-human combat...I have to either give up a trigger finger and lose firing capacity or give up a thumb and give up aiming/movement capacity in order to execute a spiffy combat maneuver involving a jump or crouch. Obviously, that's a big sacrifice.

I have a racing steering wheel controller that I bought for playing Project Gotham 2 that has a foot pedal attachment for gas and brakes. It makes driving considerably easier to control for the game.

I'll have to take a look online and see if I can find non-steering wheel controllers that have pedal attachments. Might be a good business opportunity of none exist.

I think they have some game controllers designed for FPS that are shaped like guns and use some mechanism to translate where you point the controller at the screen to move your in-game view. Not sure how that works or if they are any good. I'll have a look at those too.

Update: OK, so the guns I saw are light guns and I guess they work with games specifically designed for light guns like those zombie shooter types. Foot pedals do exist, but they are designed to work in conjunction with the light guns as reload buttons. So, it appears there isn't an offering out there that does what I want. Now I just need to figure out how to build my own controller. :)