There is what looks like another maddening design fail, 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-hand R and ZR buttons to 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 builds combos from light, medium, and heavy punches and kicks, which is best suited to a six-button layout. Played on a ‘regular’ controller, those inputs usually extend from the four face buttons to the right-hand shoulder buttons. Here, the B, A, and ZR buttons, and the Y, X, and R buttons line up in rows, so the game plays just like it would on an actual cabinet. It’s neat.
However, I wouldn’t use the Mini Arcade Pro to play fighters competitively, even for low-stakes online play. While the joystick feels great, the rest of the inputs feel far from tournament grade. I occasionally noticed overly sensitive “twitchy” controls, where pressing a button once—to select a game in a compendium title, for instance—would result in multiple inputs, even without that aforementioned Turbo feature activated. It’s not a consistent problem, but annoying when it happens.
Photograph: Matt Kamen
As the Mini Arcade Pro is only designed for one player, it feels better suited to arcade puzzlers, shooters, and side-scrolling beat-’em-ups anyway. The Golden Axe games in Sega Genesis/Mega Drive Collection, the entire roster of Capcom Beat-’Em-Up Bundle, and Namco Museum’s Splatterhouse all fared well, as did classics Pac-Man and Galaga. Shooters in particular are where that Turbo feature does come in handy—hold down the Turbo button, then the input you want to apply the feature to, and blast away to your heart’s content. Repeat the process to turn the feature off.
That’s probably not enough to salvage this for most players, though. Unless you’re using your Switch or Switch 2 to near-exclusively play old-school games—or at least old-school style games, like Streets of Rage 4 or Terminator 2D: No Fate—then this has limited appeal. Coupled with the hoops you need to jump through to update it for Switch 2 usage and the abysmal imagery slopped all over the thing, the Mini Arcade Pro isn’t so much retro as it’s better left in the past.