One of the things I really loved about the IntCode problems was best exhibited by that Breakout game. One way of solving the problem was to create a joystick, as you said, but if you had built an IntCode inspector/debugger, you could also dig into the game code itself (your puzzle input) and find out where the blocks were in memory, and how much each one was worth, and just sum it up directly.

It reminded me of Wastl's other big puzzle collection (Synacore) which also had a big emphasis on implementing a VM to host further puzzles on top of.