So, in the span of a few years, I went from the best home joystick ever made to the worst home joystick I’ve ever used (and yes, that includes the wacko joystick things that the TI-99/4a used). So, as a result, I kind of fell out of even caring at all about joysticks for home consoles. I would briefly toy around with the idea of building my own joystick out of wood and some arcade parts, but that always seemed to be too much work, and not enough video games.
But something happened in 2011. In 2011 I started trying to dig up some information about the upcoming Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (since I had already bought and really liked the first MvC3 game), and I saw a few videos where people were using this enormous fighting stick that looked like someone chopped off the front panel from an arcade cabinet and then jammed a USB cable on it.
Look at all of that arcadey goodness.
Which, apparently, that’s exactly what it is. Which means two things:
- These things are kind of expensive. Around $100 or more. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise to anyone who’s kicked around the idea of having an arcade cabinet in their home (some day…). Equipment that needs to stand up to the rigors of arcade life aren’t cheap.
- You’re going to get as accurate an experience as possible if you’re trying to replicate the arcade experience at home. Which, apart from taking one more reason away from going to your local arcade (assuming one even exists), ensures that you’ll have very little trouble going from your home joystick to the arcade joystick since they’re exactly the same. Finally, I can keep my muscle memory!
Now all I need to do is to find an arcade version of either Street Fighter IV or Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (since that’s what I mostly played with this thing) so that I can put my skills to use.
Some day…