16 STIFF COMPETITION
Photo: bk
HYPERKIN‘S ATARI-COMPATIBLE JOYSTICK – WORTH A SHOT?
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new joystick for your 9pin consoles and home computers for less than 20 bucks? Well, is it worth a shot? We bought one of Hyperkin’s new retro joysticks for old systems and found out if it’s a real Trooper or a lame pooper. First of all: The box You’ll get the joystick in a small cardboard box that is so small that you can’t help but wonder if the stick insite is inflatable – no way that they fit it in there. But they did. A word of warning to all you collectors out there: You need to be very careful when opening up the small box. It turns out to be rather difficult to unbox it without damaging the thin cardboard. So if you think of rapacking your joystick after every use and put it in a shelf – don’t. Be glad
you got it out there once without too much hassle if you’re lucky, put the box in your shelf and don’t think about putting the joystick back in there. That being said, let’s turn our attention to the stick itself. It looks like one of your old Atari joysticks if it played the role of Twoface on Batman. Or Phantom of the Opera. Well, you get the idea. It looks like a cross-breed between a plastic case and a fake woodgrain application. But the latter is naturally only a sticker that is applied on top of the joystick. Of the two I actually bought, one had an edge peeling off slightly. You can even see the thin white line where they bent the sticker according to the trademark edges that all Hyperkin products
