Calling the Mad Catz Arcade Gamestick 360 an "arcade" joystick is a misnomer — it's got a joystick, sure, but it's been crafted to look like an old Atari controller, not an arcade stick. No, the arcade in question here is not Chuck E. Cheese but in fact the Xbox Live Arcade. The question is, then, would you pay $60 for what amounts to a Frogger controller?
Maybe we've gone soft since the days of the 2600, but awkwardly gripping a square base while still trying to press face buttons, all the while manipulating a direction stick long enough to apply a lot of leverage to the base got uncomfortable relatively quickly. We played a variety of games with the gamestick, including Frogger, Time Pilot, Astro Pop, Paper Boy, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, and SF2: Hyper Fighting. The MadCatz GameStick was successful in lending a retro edge to the classic games, but after a brief moment of gaming retrospection, we quickly realized that we were much better at the games when using a gamepad. A long stick is inaccurate, and after dying in Frogger because we pushed left and ended up jumping forward one too many times, started missing our modern accuracy.
While I appreciate the retro-stylings, Mad Catz would have to drop the price of this stick down to about a third of what they want now before I would pick one up. Keep your eyes open for this one in clearance bins around May.