Taito, you make the stick of joy sad.
So my copy of Taito Legends for the PS2 arrived (and for a more thorough review of it, I direct you toward the dean of digital delights, Mr. Rob O’Hara, for this thorough Phosphor Dot Fossils review), and I eagerly plugged it in, along with the Mighty Stick of Joy. For those who know nothing of the Stick of Joy, it’s an enormous controller I got some time back for my PS1, boasting two full-size, old-school arcade joysticks and authentic leaf-switch arcade buttons. It is, in short, a thing of beauty, and a vital part of my game collection; I have the Stick of Joy at standing height beneath a broadcast monitor so my PS1 or PS2 can become an arcade machine for a day.
I only ran into one problem: it doesn’t work with Taito Legends. The game won’t accept a non-analog controller. (Why the hell not? Most of these games had simple, non- analog joysticks back in the day!) I was still able to play with my wireless PS2 controller, and the games are fine, but I was profoundly disappointed in this development. There’s gotta be a workaround, and I will find it. Because this joystick was meant to play Jungle Hunt and Elevator Action. To make matters worse, I recently bought an imported copy of Taito Memories Gekan from a friend of mine, another PS2 retro collection with completely different Taito games on it, and I’m worried that it too will suffer from the same problem.… Read more
