Flashback to 1995, take a look at the PCs of the era; modern cutting-edge beasts, with their 2mb non-3d accelerated graphics cards (who needs it? we’ve got fast RAMDAC!), Sound Blaster, and the Pentium was one scary, blazingly fast little beast. My first windows PC was an Acer Aspire, a little desktop with a Pentium 75mhz, 24 meg RAM, and a whopping 1GB hard drive. Guess what you also saw attached to many PCs in those days? Joysticks! Not the monstrous multi-limbed monstrosities that you’ll see at the PC stores these days, simpler things, any serious gamer had one, and perhaps something like the mighty Gravis Gamepad to go with it.
The Gravis Controls were built like tanks, and worked with almost everything, because they used the standard Joystick port, this limited them to a max of 4 buttons, and if you played two player, only 2 buttons each. It was enough to get by. Jazz Jackrabbit and the like didn’t need much as far as control went, and you’d be crazy to use the keyboard for these kind of twitch games. 
The joystick was for games like X-Wing or TIE Fighter, arcade style flight games or anything that needed a precision analog control. Save the monster “flight yokes” for the full-on flight sims. These simple sticks were enough.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but their Peripherals are top-notch. The classic game Descent eventually led me to switch to an actual flight Sim joystick in the form of the Sidewinder 3D Pro, and the gamepad is the original Sidewinder, which I bought for SNES and Genesis emulation primarily. It still used the gameport, but got around the button limitation using software trickery, and allowed daisy-chaining of multiple controllers. The Old-style Joysticks are still around, but the games that use them are no longer being made, dropping them in favor of the flight-sim style stick.
Where am I going with all of this? None of these sticks and pads are being made any more, and furthermore, many of the games that would use these sort of controls simply use a keyboard/mouse combination. The last monkey wrench is that PCs with a gameport are becoming fewer and fewer, and Microsoft is dropping support in Vista for their own controllers, what ever is the determined retrogamer to do?
Microsoft Taketh away, Microsoft Giveth back. Not many people know that Xbox 360 controllers are fully windows compatible. Mad Catz has produced an “arcade” controller which I picked up for a measly $10 at a Best Buy, good deal. With these two controllers you have a reasonable analogue for almost any control scheme for any game you might feel like playing. The arcade stick is really something, I was initially a bit disappointed, the “spinner” as it claims is not a real spinner so not very useful, but it still gives a very enjoyable experience for many MAME games.
Looking back at what I’ve written so far, I can summarize two things for you, 1) I’m an old nerd, and 2) some games are better with a gamepad or joystick, give it a try.
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I’ve always been a big fan of the Fallout Series, it was the first “open” RPG I’d played and remains one of the more “adult” games made to this point. If you are so inclined, and don’t mind the dated graphics, I highly recommend it, and you can usually find it in a package deal, both fallout games for $10 or so. The point of all of this is that some enterprising soul has spent the last year or so mucking about in Fallout 2′s data files, and found many of the uncompleted areas, he started by fixing many of the games bugs in an unofficial fan patch, then went into these unfinished areas and finished them. What we are left with is Fallout 2 : Resurrection, the game with all the content that was originally planned by the Fallout 2 devs.