Wait, wait, where does the quarter go in?
The X-Arcade is XGaming's big, sexy, double-player, professional quality arcade stick. Each player's side has a control stick, eight buttons, a start button, and a side button. This sleek and sizeable control rig will get you noticed.
The control stick feels fairly tight; its eight-way control is precise. The buttons are springy and light to the touch - perfect! Also, an adept tinkerer can open it up and manually tweak the feel of the buttons and sticks - it unscrews from the bottom for easy access. There's a lifetime warranty as well.
This is two controllers in one, but the two sides may be a bit too close for comfort. One player could sit and play with the whole thing in his or her lap, but it's definitely too close for two sitting players to use together very comfortably. However, if it were set or mounted on a table or platform, there's certainly enough space to play it standing upright, like in the arcade.
As for connecting it to a choice gaming system, an adaptor is needed. These plug into the data port on the X-Arcade unit very easily. The stick can be switched to take the place of the control pad or any analog sticks - this applies to any system. The stick is still eight-way standard, though, so there's no more real analog involved.
While the X-Arcade unit itself is wonderful, the GameCube adaptor for it isn't. To be honest, it's pretty terrible - the buttons are just all in the wrong places. One can't even play Capcom vs SNK 2 with the arcade-style button layout. However, all is not lost! The word on the street is that a new adaptor will likely be released. There's another little trick one might find useful for a lot of games - try using a PSX to GameCube adaptor with the X-Arcade PSX adaptor. An even bolder person might just open up the unit and do a little rewiring.
For those planning to use it for multiple systems - and you really probably should for $150 to $200 - all of the other system adaptors are fabulous. That might seem like a lot of money, but consider - it's two controllers in one, and you can use it on any recent system. Compared to what it would cost for two arcade sticks for each system, that's probably a darn fine deal, especially considering how high quality the X-Arcade is.
