The layout is pretty smart, with the buttons on the right side and stick on the left, with a small panel above that containing your turbo-fire switches (one for each button), your PS button (works as an Xbox Guide button on the converter), programmable button switches, and a button light. Most of that is standard issue, though the light switch is different; it causes the stick and buttons to light up, and quite brightly at that. This is just a gimmick, and it doesn’t hurt or help anything. You definitely will notice it though, since the lights combined with the metal surface of the stick causes some glare. It also offers vibration in the stick itself, though this seems like another unnecessary gimmick to me and I turned it off in any game that would let me.

It’s worth pointing out that the default button layout is obviously not much use on the 360. I can’t hold this against XCM since they didn’t build it to be an Xbox 360 stick per se, but it does mean you’ll need to change your button configuration in each game. But once that was done, I put the stick through its paces and was quite pleased. I’ll share some examples of my results with a variety of games.

Street Fighter IV: I had no problems here. Basic things like throws, focus attacks (and dash cancels out of a focus), EX special moves, and typical combos all worked fine. Despite the larger stick and wider range of motion, I was generally able to ’wrist flick’ Zangief’s 360-motion throws on the ground, and charge motions worked fine. Likewise, I had no problem doing things like Balrog (Boxer)’s headbutt and going into his Ultra move from there. Turbo-fire worked, though I’m not sure why you’d want it aside from breaking out of stun quickly. This is because turbo-fired moves cancel into one another rather than linking, which actually hurts your combo potential since you can’t go into special moves from there.

I won most of my games online, and the ones I didn’t were generally ones I would have lost no matter what controller I was on. I did fine with the XCM Rumble Joystick in Street Fighter IV.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1989 Arcade: A much simpler game, all this needs is the stick itself and two buttons. But it feels better playing TMNT on an arcade stick than the default 360 gamepad, if only because it’s an old arcade game and using arcade style controls just seems right for that. There were no problems with this, so it gets a passing grade here too.