I made an upward shooter yesterday in order to get comfortable with the joystick controls.
Sky Raider in the Arcade
The game is loosely based on the atari game river raid.
It does not keep scores and has no leaderboard.
It has 10 levels and a simple end boss.
Players need to tank up fuel as they fly over fuel pods and will have to avoid enemies or shoot to kill them.
Recently I bought this steal of a deal and got a wireless receiver for my xbox 360 controllers for windows.
very kewl stuff, even the wired headset works out of the box for skype when connected, lol.
The gamepad implementation is straight forward simulating 8 directional behaviour when the left stick xs' are > 20 from center.
have fun