Page 21 - Old School Gamer Magazine Issue #40 FREE Edition

Next up is the Battlestation II produced by a company called Multicorp. There is not much known information about this controller but it was certainly way ahead of
its time. Having a portable, fully functional two-player arcade controller in your living room would have been a dream come true for me and the children of the 90’s. This controller worked with the NES, SNES, and the Sega mega drive. I doubt this controller was cheap and it very likely did not
sell very well. There are plenty of companies that tried to release third party NES controllers and closed soon afterwards. For now, all that I have are a few photos of this beautifully monstrous beast.
This next controller is one of my favorites: the NI Mega Star. There are plenty of odd things about this one. First off, the case is translucent purple, which did not become a mainstream design choice until well after the NES life cycle during the Nintendo 64 era. It features an 8-way arcade joystick and suction cups on the bottom of the controller to provide stability (which was a
common practice on console arcade controllers). The most interesting thing to me was the placement
of the buttons and joystick which don’t seem to make a lot of logistical sense. The buttons are not horizontally aligned to the joystick like on most arcade machines, which means an uncomfortable hand position for sure. The same
is true if you are left-handed; I just can’t think of a way to comfortably play with this controller. In fact, it’s making my wrist hurt just thinking about it. One last thing
of interest on this one is that the buttons are two different sizes. This is again something that was not introduced in mainstream controller technology until years later with
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