It came, and so did i
...What is there to say? The closest i've been to having one of these in my hands was renting a Neo Geo Pocket from the brick and mortar VG store where i used to byu all my games. I've never forgotten the feeling of a clicky stick, or so i tought, because it's better than i remembered.
Out of the box it doesn't work with the Switch and you need the 8btido BT Adapter 2 with a beta firmware to do so, but i have several Neo Geo games from Amazon Prime's free monthlies and i've tested a couple of them already - i'm about to go out so i don't have time for more... yet - and man, suddendly they click again.
Like, i've played KoF obsessively for years, i've gone through every single pre-Playmore Metal Slug multiple times, i've played Breakers until they became second nature for me, SamSho, Fatal Fury Special, Art of Fighting... Using several controllers, as well as my keyboard, and none of them, EVER, have felt right.
They do now.
Neo Geo games are tailored for 2D gaming on an arcade stick, the MVS controller itself is a reproduction of the AVS arcade stick! SNK's pretzel-like inputs and Metal Slug multidirectional shooter don't feel right on a D-Pad and common controller sticks lack the proper feedback to make them work properly.
As for more precise impressions, buttons are 1,2 cm wide and the stick, wich comfortably houses your thumb, needs around half of your thumb movement to produce inputs, at wich point you find the microswitches and the click happens. The click is both audible and tactile, you can
feel the switch being pressed and confirming your input, it feels like a mechanical keyboard, and i you think that sounds good, wait until getting in game with it.
Stick gating is round outside, but clearly square inside, making diagonals easy to input since your finger is naturally guided at them.
It will screw up your shoryuken input muscle memory, you need to actively unlearn the D-Pad thumb motion for it. On Garou, i picked Terry and everything worked like a charm, but the stick disrupted every attemp of doing a Power Dunk until i stopped and analyzed the stick gating and movement, once i did it started to come out just as easily.
TLDR; the controller is god tier, and it feels comfy and solid in your hands, build quality seems legit, but only time will tell, particularly regarding the microswitches' durability.
If you ask me, 8bitdo either fucked up or gave up to greed by not making this controller Switch compatible by default, but it's worth the extra cost only to play your Switch Arcade library as it deserves.
