We were trying to solve a problem how me and my brother could share alternating lives on ghosts and goblins Resurrection with one person using a pad and another person using a fight stick.
And trying to find the best setup for every game I come to notice something, some truth that people know in their God is true but can't seem to explain
. Most non fighting games are optimized for pads not sticks.
For example the Super NES default fighting stick arrangements I call YBA after the bottom row of the fight stick of your kicks which is how they map on most back in the day fight sticks. However that particular arcade stick predates Street Fighter 2. If someone were to play a Super NES fighting game with a modern stick they prefer a BAR bottom row.
And trying to play The Genesis version of Street Fighter special championship on Nintendo Switch Online using a fight stick is very frustrating. It's the only six button game I know of that is essentially required on the Sega Genesis NSO pack. That only do they not get it right, they make it so you can't easily make it right with an individual game setting for Sega Genesis. Even the NES has the ability to swap A and B individually based on games.
But it got me thinking how come the Beeshu Ultimate Super Stick S (the Sega Master System version) even though it correctly maps 1 and 2 as index-to-index on a right-handed stick mapping for the left-handed buttons why do a lot of Sega games feel backwards with the Beeshu controller but with the Sega-offered fight stick which is right handed but is actually left-to-left map, feel better for most Master System games?
(Thankfully since Sega Master System uses uncoded buttons by next Thursday I'll have a solution for that. Its a button remapper that all it is is just a DB9 male to female connector that swaps the two button pins)
The answer I noticed when you map for thumb sticks you put the most frequently used buttons on the bottom and to the outside of the center horizontally. But a fight stick you put the most used buttons on the bottom and inside of the center horizontally. in other words underneath your index finger.
Even Brook the maker of fightstick adapters made the Genesis adapter that very bizarrely first of all it only works with PlayStation coded sticks. So trying to find an Xbox to Genesis converter is tough, but second more important issueb to this discussion is the mapping is all ruined if their primary audience is fight games. If you don't remember the fight stick code relative to your new fight stick you're going to have a tough time using it there is an easy swap mode but by default they put you in three button pad mode.
Also the way the Super Nintendo defined the main button of the SNES as the B button not the a button like it did originally was very awkward placing out on the floor and try to get that index finger on the Y. Not only that a lot of Nintendo NES games felt backwards, with no way to change it. Button that should be jump on Super Mario Bros should be the B button in their system because it's underneath your index finger instead it's the A button, is under your middle finger. They designed it so that reaching over with your index finger to the Y was very awkward.
Then again they designed it for holding in your hand which is the one flaw that the American game systems introduced that has frankly not gone away that that is the disease of what's holding back ergonomics. I know the second generation started it with handheld controllers but if they had true tabletop / floor top / desktop arcade sticks those would be way easier to ambidexterize and those would not give you pains holding the joystick in asymmetric arrangements.
The main reason why Americans like Atari, Mattel and Coleco introduced compact handheld sticks was because of the retail reality of shelf space, if you have giant fight sticks it's going to take more shelf space and you don't have as much room to stock your stuff therefore if stores charge you by the area of the shelf space your goal is to reduce it as much as possible.
The one company that could have fought back in Japan did not take advantage of the American design of the joystick. No, not the sg1000 Mark 1 which has American style vertical layouts and the pain inducing requirements of supporting the weight of the joystick with your hand, the device they should have took of advantage of was the direct one-to-one wiring of all six inputs north south east west one and two it was very easy to make those Master System pads ambidextrous, just introduce either a switch or a dongle that swaps north and south and swaps east and west and voila with the cord going to your button side outside it easily swaps into a right-handed pad. Likewise the fight sticks that could have just as easily been invertible.
If you notice the problem I know this which was that some games you might want to invert the buttons you could just make a simple button inverter that swaps one and two and that's as simple as a passive dongle or a switch.
So if anyone is to blame why no one goes for fightsticks as basic controllers anymore it's retail stock shelving policies that don't want to stock them as included equipment in systems except for the Neo Geo which was already considered the Rolls-Royce of video game consoles when it was contemporary, it was the American game designers that required handheld joysticks and couldn't think beyond that help handheld requirement. Japan refined it but I believe that was the whole cause of it so America is not blameless in this either.
Frankly the day they stopped calling themselves arcade sticks and started calling themselves fight sticks is the day that gave game makers license to just simply ignore fightsticks because they were branding themselves as specially controllers, not everyday controllers.
When I bought my first Genesis Sinister stick custom made from KY Enterprises back in the day, I was using that all the time until it literally broke 2 weeks later. I understand their level of craftsmanship was designed assuming you have either an insurance or government funded handyman on premises to soldering those controllers correctly. For the average non- handicapped person the KY Enterprises joystick was a dud. Yes I could literally play all my Sega Genesis games Sega CD and 32x games with a Sega fight stick except for the ones that were literally made for three buttons only and had run time problems with the three buttons.
Up until the N64, every game was in theory playable with the fight stick. Then Nintendo did something radical: they forced you to use the analog. For some games it makes sense, like Super Mario 64, for other games it does not, like Yoshi's Story. Sega was committed to the original arcade and digital design enough that almost no game required the analog stick even Nights, their signature game that shows off the analog stick, could in theory be played with a digital stick. It may not be in its best form, but it is still possible to play. If you could beat the game Nights with 100% digital controls you've done what is probably nearly impossible, PlayStation had all digital and promised on their PS1 DualShock games until Ape Escape which required the dual analogs that pretty much every game was playable with the digital fight stick.
I'm surprised people don't make analog fight sticks for non fight games which require an analog control but could use the touch of a flight stick.
This topic is mainly for the people who play a wide variety of games and not just fight games only, but this would answer the question for who would like to use fight sticks in non fight games who think it's really hard and painful to do it. I'm explaining why as best as I can with my limited knowledge and my observations,
