Basic FunThe Bridge Direct Atari Plug & Play Joystick

I unpacked the controller with my wife and we had a blast playing centipede on our TV. It brought back memories of the days at arcades which dates us for sure. You can’t beat the price for fun it provides.

Perfectly fine for the current price of ten bucks. Got it for Breakout, Centipede/Millipede, and Missile Command primarily. Only four stars because the joystick is a wrist killer. There is an easy fix, however. The joystick takes a lot of effort to move because there is too great a gap between the four pads at the base of the joystick and the four directional switches that activate movement. I'll try to post a picture or two, but a five-minute fix is to remove the batteries from the unit and unscrew the four screws on the bottom of the unit. This will free the joystick mechanism from the electronics. The joystick consists off a rubber sheath over a plastic insert. The top of the insert is hollow. Simply take a small nail or screw with a thin head, or in my case a single stud round LEGO piece, and drop it down the top of the plastic insert so the head of the nail/screw/LEGO stud remains on top, not falling through. That extra thickness of the nailhead/screwhead/LEGO stud serves to shorten the travel distance required to generate movement once you reattach the joystick to the electronics. When reassembling, take care to align the larger pair of pads on the bottom of the white inner stick with the cutouts visible on the bottom of the black outer sleeve. Also, make sure you put the Fire button back in it's hole! You should be able to test your results without screwing the two portions of the product together... just swap a different nail/screw/LEGO piece if the results aren't satisfactory.

This little unit was bought for my husband, but the main player turned out to be our five year old. These games have simple controls that did not take him long to master. The provided cord plugs into the white and yellow holes on the front of an old style tv we had in our house so if using on a newer tv you'd want some kind of converting cord unless your tv still had the old red white yellow input ports. Put batteries in it on Christmas morning and they're still going strong with heavy daily use almost a month later. This is an excellent value for either nostalgia or a young gamer.

Plug and play....a few well known games....good times had by all........keep a couple AA batteries handy though...you'll be needing them in the joystick itself.....

Bought this for my son's birthday, he likes the old classic games and enjoyed playing a console like this at a babysitters.Very fun, and very easy to hook up

Works great. Thank you!

on asteroids game is different than the original, the original you move and had to stop manually, now this is very easy to use like for special need child, not fair for us who love the original version, bought this same control on 2012 and feels very hard and slow to move on the games

The only negative comment from my kids with this Christmas gift was "I wish it had PacMan". Most of the games were pretty cool.