Comment 73 for bug 274203

Let's get a few facts straight:

I was confused about all the reports regarding joysticks not working like they were before. What I missed was that X didn't use them by default, and shouldnt. Adding them to the fdi file on -joystick was only done to let your devices to work without crashing the server. Boohoo.

Now I realize (thanks to Emmet) that what really has been happening all along is that evdev-driver grabs the device, which makes it impossible to use /dev/input/js*. This is something that looks unlikely to be fixed in Intrepid anymore, since it's unclear how to fix it most efficiently. The kernel should report that the device is a joystick, but HAL needs to be aware of that and not list the device as input.mouse (and/or .keyboard).
Then the fdi file for -joystick is a trivial one and would match all joysticks.

The workaround for you guys is to copy the fdi-file from joystick to /etc/hal/fdi/policy, and edit it to not load a driver for your device (you can match using the product id of your device if not listed already, see 'lshal'). Then uninstall -joystick (dunno if it's needed, maybe), restart hal & X. The old games should work now..