https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25729
--- Comment #18 from Rixa rixa@cs.tut.fi --- It is possible to remap the axes, either in wine (see my Comment 8) or the game itself. The latter is through a file in My Documents (I think it's your home directory in wine by default) at "Electronic Arts/Dead Space/joypad.txt". There is a joypad_example.txt there that may give a clue of how it's done.
Unfortunately this will still not yield a perfect configuration since it is not possible to assign button actions to the analogue triggers through either method, and it gets to be a bummer for Dead Space.
However, Dead Space also supports XInput. Wine doesn't, but I have had good results using the third party program x360ce, with this game and many others that do. All the controls work, and as an added bonus it has AntiDeadZone features that help undo some of the control weirdness of the PC port.
The setup program needs a bunch of dotnet winetricks to run, I don't even have the list of them all. They are only needed to build the configuration though, once it's ready you just drop it as x360ce.ini with the custom xinput1_3.dll to the game directory and that's it.
Well, for Dead Space you'll also want to make sure the joypad.txt (see the first paragraph) file is empty, or you will get surprising results. I think it's trying apply those in addition to what it's getting from XInput.
In general I think it would be really neat and make many newer games run so much smoother with a gamepad if wine just supported XInput out of the box, at least for the known microsoft controllers that pretty much define it.