NES Advantage:



So beautiful, yet so bad.

Don't get me wrong. Back in the day I loved this thing. We all did, but that nostalgia fades away when faced with this relic of our youths.

It was old as the stick that gave us the experience of a real arcade joystick. The problem with that was the flimsy Japanese design when most of us who were in arcades in the mid 1980s were used to machines that had parts from Wico or Industrio Lorenzo. If you played Donkey Kong in the arcades you know the joystick was a medium-short metal shaft with a big red ball on top of it. What we have here is a fairly thin metal shaft with a small plastic ball on top of it and a matching black plastic cover on the shaft. The buttons, instead of having a plunger mounted in a sleeve above a microswitch like arcade buttons did put the plunger over a membrane on the PCB.

The stick is pretty lightweight with mush of the weight being in the ball on top. Consequently, the ball would snap off at inopportune times. Not that any time where part of your controller breaks off in your hand would be opportune. It doesn't stick like the buttons do if you press it too far, but it does have some rebound if you get it NOS, meaning that if you press hard to the right and you let go the self centering springs will overcorrect and often register as pressing left for a couple frames.

The result of the sleeveless button design is that if you push the buttons too hard they could slide under the housing of the controller and get stuck. They could get stuck anyway because of how snug the fit was and the friction of hard plastic on hard plastic without any lubrication or even slick surfaces (a problem that would continue to haunt Nintendo over the years as you'll see in upcoming reviews). The end result being that even though the buttons were nice and big, you had to press dead center, negating the benefits of those lovely large buttons. And they're kinda loud clicky clicky which shouldn't be a problem if you play on modern arcade controls, but can be distracting compared to the quiet of the NES pad and Wico leaf switch buttons of that era's arcades.

Now let's talk special features. The patented turbo function (patent expired last year if anyone wants to make clones of this thing now) allows you to dial in the speed of your turbo with a nifty little potentiometer and see how fast it works with an led that lights up when the button is active. This is probably the most awesome of features the Advantage. The other two features are slow motion which just presses start rapidly and is actually pretty useless for all the games that play a tone when you pause or display a menu. Also useless is the two output plugs and a switch for which one is active. Nobody used this feature ever because you don't want to play two player games where you take turns. You, as a gamer want your two player games to have both players on screen and active at the same time like in River City Ransom or all the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games beyond the bizzare first game in the series.

My verdict is Thumbs Down for the Advantage.
If you are looking to play NES games on the original system the classic NES pad is sufficient or the Max if you really need turbo. If you are looking to mod a controller for playing classic games on a newer system there are much better arcade sticks out there for pretty much every system. Also the space beneath the buttons is too small to to move the led to from up above if you were planning on replacing the opaque red plastic buttons with something partially transparent so that the buttons themselves light up with every press.

In conclusion, you can do better.

NES MAX > NES Advantage

That's some truth right there.

For some odd reason I thought the Advantage was a cool and awesome controller because so many people remember it. Admittedly, I was willfully ignorant of it, and I never really heard anyone say they liked that much, but at least if I see it on sale someplace I'll know not to pick it up.

The advantage is an absolute essential for Joust, Galaga, Karnov, Defender II, the list goes on. There is nothing quite like playing Contra or Ninja Turtles with an arcade stick again.

I never owned an NES, but I did have an SNES, and with my SNES I used the Super NES Advantage controller. I really liked that thing, though at times it could make some games a little hard to play.

It's not that bad. I plan on picking up another one (they're really dirt cheap here) and fixing it up to arcade standard.

I have two NES Advantage controllers and two NES Max controllers, and the Max definitely wins in turns of the D-pad and the general shape, but I do enjoy the Advantage's variable speed turbo dials. I think the Advantage's most useless feature is the "Slow" button, which might possibly help with some astounding jumps in a game like Metroid, but in Zelda, it brings up and puts away the inventory screen every second. Lame...

Slow motion buttons on controllers are terrible, they generally hammer on the start button.

Yea, I don't know which crazy man thought a slo-mo button would be a good idea!

If it could work on Ghosts 'n Goblins, then it would actually be useful.

My favorite part about the advantage was twisting the ball off the end and playing with it, so yeah, not the best controller. But I don't understand how you could have the ball snap off, when its always unscrewed and being tossed around by the second player while he waits for his turn. . .

Maxx was a good controller though. Did it have the first "analog stick" ever?

Worked like a charm on the Back to the Future game when you had to throw root beer at the bullies.

Other than that. Just give me the image of perfection:



Classic < The Advantage (NES cover band) < MAX < The Advantage (controller)


Case closed.

^ Ever use the dogbone controller? I like that better than the classic, its the most ergonomically.

When I found my advantage in a pawn shop I was thrilled, totally stoked and my NES MAX I love them both..

Granted the Max has far more uses than the advantage but I think they are both A-1

BTW nice review.