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There’s what feels like another infuriating design failure, with the Switch’s left shoulder buttons, L and ZL, positioned on the RIGHT of the Mini Arcade Pro’s eight-button layout, with the right R and ZR buttons for their LEFT. However, this is actually a trick borrowed from other console arcade sticks, and it works surprisingly well for 2D fighters such as Ultra Street Fighter II. Capcom’s classic series creates combos from light, medium, and heavy punches and kicks, best suited to a six-button layout. Played on a “normal” controller, these inputs typically extend from the four face buttons to the right shoulder buttons. Here the B, A and ZR buttons, as well as the Y, X and R buttons are lined up in rows, so the game plays as if it were a real cabinet. It’s nice.
However, I wouldn’t use the Mini Arcade Pro to compete against fighters, even for low-stakes online play. While the joystick feels nice to the touch, the rest of the inputs feel far from tournament quality. I sometimes noticed overly sensitive “jittery” controls, where pressing a button once (to select a game in a compendium title, for example) would result in multiple inputs, even without the aforementioned Turbo feature enabled. This is not a recurring problem, but annoying when it happens.
Photography: Matt Kamen
Since the Mini Arcade Pro is only designed for a single player, it seems better suited to arcade puzzles, shooters, and side-scrolling beat-’em-ups anyway. THE Golden Ax games in Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Collectionthe whole list of Capcom Beat-‘Em-Up BundleAnd Namco Museum Splash House everything went well, just like the classics Pac-Man And They show. It’s in shooter games in particular where this Turbo feature comes in handy: hold down the Turbo button, then the input you want to apply the feature to, and blast to your heart’s content. Repeat the process to disable the feature.
However, that’s probably not enough to save this for most players. Unless you use your Switch or Switch 2 to play almost exclusively old-school games – or at least old-school style games, like Streets of Rage 4 Or Terminator 2D: No Destiny– then it has limited appeal. Coupled with the hoops you have to jump through to update it for use on Switch 2 and the terrible visuals strewn everywhere, the Mini Arcade Pro isn’t so retro that it’s best left in the past.
