Exposing my socks to the world

The other day, I kind of gushed about the best controller ever made, the NES Advantage. So, it kind of stood to reason that when there was an Advantage controller that was for the Super NES, that I would have to have it. I mean, an updated version of my favorite controller ever for what was then my current favorite video game system? It’s got Super NES styling? Insta-sale!

But, somehow, this controller ranks near the bottom for any controller I’ve ever used. How? Well, let’s see here.

The button layout is terrible. The two grey buttons on the stick are for the L and R buttons, a.k.a. the ‘shoulder buttons’, that are on the top of the controller. So, naturally, these were moved to the bottom of the control panel.

Even more aggravating is that fighting games were pretty popular around that time, and I would have loved to use this thing to replicate the arcade experience, but the buttons weren’t laid out in the classic ‘two rows of three’ layout that made fighting games work. I tried to make the ‘two rows of three’ happen by assigning the ‘L’ button to the top row and the ‘R’ button to the bottom row, but it was a fairly poor substitute.

The buttons themselves also seemed to stick in the ‘depressed’ position if you didn’t hit them dead-center, and since the controller is so huge, there’s a lot of travel between the buttons, and a lot of mis-hits.

The slowmo button is relocated to a giant button in the center of the controller where it’s super-easy to accidentally hit.

The LED’s that show how fast the autofire is firing have been removed, so it’s kind of a guess now. Sure, there are sliders, but they’re not particularly easy to gauge.

And, at least on mine, the stick doesn’t always recenter itself properly. Mine liked to hang out in the down-left position. That’s probably a defect in my controller, but I was so disappointed in every other aspect of this thing that I never bothered to replace it, and I wouldn’t buy another joystick until 2011, which we’ll get into another day.

About the only good thing I have to say about this controller is that it helped be to finish Battletoads in Battlemaniacs. Mostly because whoever made that game reversed the most common assignments for buttons, and I could only make anything resembling progress by using the stick’s bizarro layout.

Still, it’s a bad controller, one that I wouldn’t even wish on someone I didn’t like.

I’ve mentioned a few times around the Internet that I like the NES Advantage. It’s true, it’s one of my favorite controllers of all time. I mean, just take a look at this thing.

It’s perfect in almost every way. It’s a good size, it fits my hands, it’s got a comfortable button layout, it’s got lights so I can see how fast the autofire is pushing the button for me, it can switch from player 1 to player 2 with the flick of a switch, and so on. It’s the next best thing to having an arcade stick in your home to play all of those arcade-quality games on your NES. I could go on, but then this would turn into some kind of gushing, fawning article, and I’m not sure I want to go down that path… again.

What’s pictured above is not my first NES Advantage. I’m actually on my second one. The first one I had lasted me through the end of the NES’s life, and then met an unfortunate end courtesy of the sharp legs of an easy chair some time in 1995.

I was so disappointed that I kind of stopped playing NES games for a while. I moved on to the Super NES and then to the N64, and then one day in 2000 I went to my local Toys R Us, and they had an entire aisle lined with NES Advantage controllers. I couldn’t believe my luck, so I grabbed one (rather shortsighted, I guess) and took it to the counter to pay. The lady looked at it and asked me with a hint of disbelief in her voice, “You know this is for the regular, old NES, right?”. I assured her that I knew that and that’s why I wanted it.