Extracted from: Vol. 3 Vol.8 / Released: December 1987
| JOYSTICKS can cause endless problems they don’t move quickly enough and they also wear out rapidly. Star-Trak is a small handheld pad which puts all possible stickposition and firebutton combinations on to individual keys to overcome these problems. So, for example, you can select “up-left” or “up-left-plusfire” with a single touch. It’s not the first keypad to hit the market, and some of the othersc have left a lot to be desired, so I was initially sceptical about testing this one. However, after playing with it for an hour or two, I found myself getting hooked, and wondering why no-one has marketed anything quite like this before. The first thing you notice is that the pad is easy and comfortable to use. It is equally suitable for left or righthanded players, and the buttons have a crisp, positive feel to them. I expected that it would take an hour -or two to get used to the key layout, but in fact I was blasting away at full speed after only about 15 minutes which was when I noticed how much it reduces wear and tear on the wrist and trigger finger. The next thing that hits you is the pad’s responsiveness. You know how tricky it can be to get Bounty Bob into precisely the right position before he jumps? Well it’s a doddle with this controller you can move him a couple of millimetres at a timer simply by touching the key briefly. Far more accurate and sensitive than a joystick. The pad also eliminates a major bane of the arcade-game player’s life: Unreliable diagonal movement. Conventional sticks are prone to this problem, because they contain only four switches: Up, down, left and right. To get diagonal movement, two adjacent switches must be levered down simultaneously, and if you get the stick position slightly wrong, only one of the two gets pressed. The result is horizontal or vertical rather than diagonal movement — very frustrating on games which give you limited space to manoeuvre. |
| With the Star-Trak pad this can’t happen, since there is only one key to press for diagonal movement. An electronic decoder generates the correct signal, so you can’t get it wrong. Another useful feature “is a central extra fire button which has three functions controlled by a slide switch. With this switch set to normal a single touch on the central button produces a single shot which will always deliver, no matter how briefly you press button. Set the switch to Auto, and you get conventional auto-fire which blasts away without your touching any key. But there’s also a centre position which gives you Burst action – press the button and you get auto fire, release it and firing stops. Where this controller really scores, though, is on generation of sports simulations — Karate and Olympics clones which rapidly hammer joysticks to death and require complex position and/or fire button combinations. It has now been extensively consumer tested — by me, my wife, two children and the cat — and, with one furry exception, all participants managed to beat their previous high scores on several arcade games, so we’re very happy with it. The controller isn’t perfect for every program, though. Conventional joysticks give a more authentic feel on flight and driving simulations, and one or two games involve rotating the joystick rapidly around its eight positions, which is very tricky to do with Star Trek. It’s worth hanging on to your old joystick for games like these, but for many others, especially the latest generation, the new pad appears to have a definite edge, There are also two other things worth mentioning. First, it comes complete with a three-metre lead which plugs into the pad rather than being wired permanently in place. You can use this lead with conventional joysticks, or paddles, or anything else that plugs into a joystick including Len Golding’s gadgets. Nice bonus, that. Second, the pad is made entirely in this country, and it is evident from the design and construction —yes, I took the back off – that it is built to last. The switches are all genuine keyboard ”click” types – not a rubber membrane in sight — and the rest of the mechanism is solid-state, so there’s very little to go wrong. In fact the manufacturers guarantee it for 12 months, which is a good measure of their confidence. All this makes the price tag of €18.85 look quite reasonable – if it outlasts two joysticks, you’ve made a profit! And I can see these controllers turning up in a great many Christmas stockings this year. |
