21st Century Digital Boy

QTTabBar (XP, Vista) is a freeware addon for Windows Explorer which adds tabs, a quick search bar, a drop-down menu for navigating subdirectories, preview tooltips for various image formats, a customisable application launcher and god knows what else. Really, really nice little thing. The only thing I don’t quite like is that there’s no option to have its toolbar display small icons and text labels (or text labels at all). Other than that, it’s nice and quick and offers some really nice options to improve Explorer’s handling.

In other news, I recently bought the Naki Ultimate Fighting Stick off eBay since this seems to be the only not completely shit arcade stick available for the Xbox. It boasts an impressive feature set by working with both the Xbox and PS2, having vibration motors and even two analogue “trackballs” that can be used as analog sticks on both consoles. It’s also wireless, running on a mere three AAA batteries.

Fighting Game Nerds over on the shoryuken.com forums stated that the buttons and stick on this thing were terrible, which worried me a bit - and, as it turns out, they weren’t quite wrong. The stick has a fairly large range of movement and the buttons feel a bit mushy, but it’s decent enough if you’re not an uber precision/speed geek. What bothers me the most is that the buttons don’t click as nicely as the ones on most other sticks. That aside, the above-linked thread also mentions that the parts can apparently be replaced with proper arcade-grade gear with not too much effort if you’re so inclined.

Aside from the buttons being somewhat spongy, the only things that bother me slightly are that the shoulder trigger buttons don’t work if the thing is connected to the Xbox (which is forgivable, considering that the triggers on the Xbox gamepad are fully analog) and that the plastic cover on the case hole for the stick is loose. This seems to be common practice though, but something that I consider a minor annoyance. There’s no input lag of note on either the PS or the Xbox, and the general feel and layout of the stick works quite well.

In general, I’m quite happy with this as a 30 quid purchase (including shipping). Being able to play Guilty Gear on my Xbox with a proper arcade stick = yes, and having a second stick around for the Playstation (I already own the official PS1 arcade stick by Asciiware) in case it’s necessary is also a nice thing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 23:13 and is filed under braindump. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.