Ah nostalgia. What a wonderful thing. It amplifies all the warm and happy memories of the past while expunging the less than pleasant experiences that invariably accompany human existence at any point in time. So we can look fondly back on TV programs like Knight Rider and Manimal while forgetting that we were probably watching them on a 17 inch telly with no remote and an enforced bed-time when the show was over looming over our little heads.

And so it is with retro gaming. Gamers of a certain age will go all misty eyed when they recall the gaming of their youth, rambling on about sprites, dongles and Competition Pro joysticks. And while the wonders of emulation on the have resurrected almost every single game that was ever created, the Competition Pro has remained a distant memory. Up until now, that is. German firm Speed-Link have reanimated the Competition Pro's lifeless form, digging up its still sturdy body and lopping off the old serial plug and replacing it with a PC-friendly USB connector.

First impressions often count, so to see such a fondly remembered object of my youth beautifully presented in a see-through plastic box with a red ribbon tied around it's shaft made a for a fine start. Everything looked just right, the weight was correct and the cable was good and long. Plugging it into the PC was pure simplicity, with Windows instantly recognising and configuring the stick, something which is often rare with odd or revivalist USB products that originate from the smokey factory regions of furthest China. The Competition Pro will work as a normal stick for any game, but as it's a purely affair - it's either move or stop - and with no more or no less than eight cardinal points of movement, it is rather unsuited to most modern games. Yet seeing as the only modern game which really required a joystick, the space combat sim, died an unnecessary and much lamented death a few years back, only the dimmest of gamers will not realise that this sticks entire reason d'etre is to play old retro games on the PC without having to use the keyboard (something that is only chronologically correct if you were a poor spectrum owner) or a gamepad, a piece of technology that didn't even exist when many of the finest games of the eight-bit era were enjoying their heyday. And for these games the stick works wonderfully. Falcon Patrol, Pitstop and Manic Miner all played so much better with the Competition Pro. It felt right, it played right, it was, you know, right.

Sweeping aside the nostalgia and moving on to more serious issues, there were a couple of things about this resurrected joystick which troubled me. The first was a slight problem with the micro-switches under the left fire-button. When I first started using the stick any jabs on the lower end of the button would often fail to register. Now after a time it fixed itself - maybe the plastic mouldings settled into a better position - but it did raise concerns about the overall build quality of the stick. The rims around the fire buttons are also rather sharp and the plastic used in construction felt a bit cheap. It's hard to describe, and I am probably unfairly comparing something real and tangible in the present with something that only resides in receding memories. I also don't really feel that the stick is in any real danger of falling apart during a frantic bout of IK+. In fact, in the advancing years 98% of the retro gamers this stick is aimed at are decreasingly likely to waggle the stick to destruction.

So a few minor concerns about build quality aside, the reborn Competition Pro is exactly what any gamer with a collection of old -8bit games is looking for. In fact, getting one of these is liable to reignite your passions for retro games, as they play so much better with an authentic stick than any halfway-house measures. And while it's not much good for use in MAME games that require more than one fire button, it will serve you extremely well if you are emulating a C64, Spectrum, or any of the other home machines which made the eighties such a wonderful time to be a gamer.

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More info and a list of retailers is available here.

By Sam Gibson

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