Blast from the Past With The Live Arcade Retro Stick (And Now We're Trying To Look For It)

Posted Aug 18, 2006 at 9:22PM by QJ Staff Listed in: Xbox 360 Tags: EBGames, Galaga, Gamespot, retro, Xbox Live Arcade, Yahoo!
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The Retail Radar over at GameSpot spotted this peripheral that should bring back some good, old-fashioned gaming memories to a rather contemporary, cutting-edge platform. Mad Catz's Xbox Live Arcade Retro Stick brings together the dual analog stick controls and buttons of the Xbox controller onto a solid base, and throws in a retro-style arcade joystick (okay, so it's just a long control stick replacing the stubby analog thumb-stick to those of us not old enough to remember the good old days) onto the primary analog to boot.

The peripheral's bound to be great with retro-arcade games like Pac Man and Galaga, bringing that old-school gaming feel to old-school games. The Gamespot article also reports that the stick is pegged for $69.99 (ouch! The past bites back!) but will include one hundred Microsoft points out of the box, a free month-long Live Gold subscription, and three... well, the article mentions that whatever those three were, they were unreadable, but they're guessing free Live Arcade games.

This excited our curiosity, so we decided to run over to the hotlinked EBGames page for the product to check it out.

Guess what we got?

Sorry!
We tried, but we just couldn't find the page you were looking for. If you arrived at this page through a link from another website, please contact that site's administrator to report the dead link. If you were using a bookmark, it's probably outdated, so please return to our homepage and create a new one.


Whoa! That really IS a surprise!

Thank the heavens for Google, Yahoo, AskJeeves, and whatever search portal we can get our hands on; we've found indicators of this story elsewhere. Joystiq's reported that EBGames had yanked the Live Arcade Retro Stick page out, probably because it was a leak, and probably because they were still finalizing the details regarding the free games that would be included in the package. And they've reported a new (probable) price: $49.99.

Besides the "probables," they also managed to get an actual screenshot of the product from EB games, before the page got yanked out.

A screenshot of Mad Catz's Live Arcade Stick as advertized on EB Games... before they yanked it out. Courtesy of joystiq.com


Oh, well. At least that settles the mystery of the disappearing arcade stick.

Via GameSpot

 
 
 

Comments [refresh]

by Parade Rainer - 2006-08-18 20:07
» Stupid Nub Replacement

An analog nub with a big ol stick on it, uhhhhh thats going to suck.....



The D-Pad sucks on the 360 controller, its a fact, look it up, i saw it on the news.



They need to do a controller re-design badly... how the heck do you have a $400 system that doesnt even play street fighter, frogger or pacman well. They should have found out by now its a problem right? I know its true, I heard it on the radio.



This controller is surely not the answer to this BIG problem. It looks like stick on a @#%.

by Brucie - 2006-08-18 20:20
» Not impressed

Yeah i agree, really a pointless controller.

if you wanna play arcade games properly on the 360, buy the Dead or Alive 4 Arcade Stick, at least that has a good stick so it reads motions correctly. Perfect for street fighter and all the other arcade games.



1/5 for this stick. only 1 for the free stuff

by CHROME HOUND - 2006-08-18 23:07
» Lol

"They need to do a controller re-design badly"



Are you talking about this joy stick or the actual controller the 360 comes with? If the latter you are the stupidest person on QJ... and that's saying something.

by Parade boy - 2006-08-19 00:53
» ROFL

"Are you talking about this joy stick or the actual controller the 360 comes with? If the latter you are the stupidest person on QJ... and that's saying something."



Yup I said it, the D-Pad sucks on the Microsoft Xbox 360 Controller. Sorry but its horrible if you think its an lol joke you have obviously not played frogger, pac man, or streetfighter with it. It's horrible for anything requireing percision d-pad input. After playing these games I realized the lack of control when playing any game with the d-pad.



Street fighter is pretty much the best test of a joystick / dpad in my opinion, the way you roll out quarter and half circles, as well as do accurate left/right up/down charge moves can pretty much tell you if you've got a sharply tuned blade of accuracy, or a soupy wet bowl of microwaved meatball.



So my final analagy is that the ps2 dpad is like an Accura NSX and the Xbox 360 dpad is like a Ford Mustang.



The End.

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