Gadgetory

today we're going to talk about a little bit of a weird controller this is something that I've seen some coverage over the past I was really curious about it and the company that makes it actually reach out to me seeing if I want to check it out and I had to say yes because I really wanted to see how this thing worked firsthand for myself and it's this guy right here the mix box arcade stick kind of this is a fight stick but instead of having well the stick part of it they replaced it with a keyboard setup with four keys that resemble a WASD so the argument here is that if you've been playing fighting games on keyboard first you're a PC player you never got a stick or anything before this is gonna be normal or natural for you or another argument is that this is actually more intuitive for someone who's new to fighting games in general which I grew up on arcade stick so that's a weird sell to me but that's part of the reason why I really want to check this guy out now before we talk about how it actually works in personal it's kind of cover the build of this guy so this is using a metal arcade body that weighs a little over 5 pounds so it has a decent heft to it but it's not anything crazy heavy it's gonna be nice and comfy on your lap and obviously the setup we've talked about is that we've got the 4 WASD buttons right here for movement and then we've got the 8 v buttons right here for all the main buttons for you know attacks and then there's a couple of buttons that are moved to the top for kind of auxilary stuff like options pressing the touchpad share button and the PlayStation button one of the things that I really like about this guy is the fact that sometimes when companies have kind of cool concepts or weird ideas like this they'll con rely on just the concept alone and cheap out on the actual quality and thankfully that isn't the situation here so obviously we have the keyboard and button set up and there are both really high quality stuff the keyboard parts are using red Cherry MX switches if that means nothing to you basically Cherry MX switches are the industry standard for good keyboard switches it's what a lot of gaming keyboards use red ones in particular like this the main point of them is that they're very light and easy to press so you can do rapid press really easily now as for the arcade buttons same kind of deal these are using what are called sound wad entry buttons I've talked about them a little bit in the past basically same idea they are an industry standard for what a good arcade button should feel like so overall build play stuff here I like a lot of what's going on my only complaint has to do with the cables so back here we have a little hatch that hides the cable which is pretty standard on fightsticks but it doesn't have like a hinge it just comes off entirely which is a little annoying because that means you could lose it if you forget to put it back on and the cable length is a little shorter than I'd like it's long enough if you're going to use it in a PC setup or you have some kind of desk B as far as setup you're using it at a tournament but in a traditional living room setup it is not long enough so for testing this guy out I tried it with a bunch of room fighting games specifically Tekken 7 Dragon Ball fighters injustice 2 and Street Fighter which is the one I'm going to use just kind of show some examples of stuff and like I said one of the big things about this guy is that it's supposedly it's supposed to be more intuitive for newer players and I gotta admit it's actually a lot more so than I thought it would be I mean I used to mess with keyboard a little bit in fighting games back in like college but I was using a really bad keyboard so there were other problems there with this guy it actually was pretty simple I mean there's certain things that are obviously really easy to do you know if you have to do any kind of double taps or just do one direction that kind of thing it's easy so for Tekken it's great but for Street Fighter this is the game that worried me the most because this like a lot of other fighting games relies a lot on circular input stuff that was designed based on the fact that you're using an arcade stick so for instance you know the classic aduke and is doing down forward punch and that's not that hard to do here you just kind of have to just kind of roll the keys and you get no problem I thought it'd be a little more difficult to do something like an uppercut because that's like a weird like Z motion on a stick but once again it actually came to me pretty naturally more than I thought it would no it's faster yeah because I use multiple fingers I'm not relying on one hand moving I'm just so the real thing that scared me about Street Fighter with this guy is this big fellow right here zingy so Zen keeps a fighter that relies on doing things that involve like 360 and even full-on 720 inputs which with a stick makes a lot of sense you just roll it around really fast with this guy though it's a little weirder because you kind of have to just move the keys and I've gotten the point where I can like kind of do it reliably for the 360 the 720 I'm not even come for enough to try that right now I've been able to do it but it's not nearly as intuitive or friendly as a stick is so when it comes to using this guy with something that has that rapid emotion it's not impossible to do it's just not quite as simple or as intuitive as a stick would be but that's really the one main region where this guy starts to fall off for me when it comes to just normal quarter circles half circles and you know just directional stuff it really surprised me how intuitive and defending this guy honestly if I'm playing something where I'm not playing as you know this guy right here I actually think I'm gonna start shifting over to using this instead of a traditional fighting stick because something too especially for new people that's really cool about this is that when you're doing stuff like rolling inputs it's really easy to accidentally like overturn and go too high and then you're jumping when you don't mean to and stuff like that especially when you're like frantic in the fight it's really hard to do that because you can't exactly accidentally hit the up key you know you're just hitting the two keys you need and it works fine so yeah I actually really like this so at the end of the day you're gonna use whatever style fits you best if you're already pro fighter status and you have your arcade stick in there happy with it great but if you're looking to get into fighting games and fightstick seem a little weird view honestly give this thing a look because like I said I really just want to check it out because I was curious I was a little skeptical at first but it's really won me over it is super intuitive super comfy to use it's awesome if you want you get out I have a link down below in the description they also sell this in a black if white isn't so much your style so check that out