gosokkyu
@gosokkyu

Tanita, the erstwhile health equipment company whose Virtual-On-loving president negotiated a license to produce brand-new Twin Stick arcade controllers for PS4 back in 2018, has just opened orders for a new run of Twin Sticks via Sanwa Denshi's web store—these sticks were originally produced via crowdfunded bulk orders, and this is the first time they've been available for purchase since 2020. They're not strictly 1:1 with the old sticks, as they've added extra buttons to each stick and strengthened certain components, etc but they're certainly close enough, and they were designed to fit directly into Astro City cabinets and with components that could be sold and used as replacement parts for vintage Twin Sticks, too.

They're not cheap (¥68,200!), Sanwa won't ship them outside of Japan and they're only officially supported by three games—the Virtual-On Masterpieces collection for PS4, which includes authentic online-enabled ports of the three arcade games; Toaru Majutsu no Virtual On, the original Index-themed VO game for PS4/Vita that died a painful death in 2018 and has been delisted for years; and Alice Gear Aegis CS, a recent console adaptation of the Taito-published 3D mecha musume versus game by Pyramid, the Dariusburst devs—but if you have any interest in owning one of these, this might be your last chance to nab one.

Tanita doesn't just make these sticks, either: they've also hosted a Virtual On series tournament, TANITA CUP, every year since 2021, purely for the sake of it. I don't even think it's an attempt to build groundswell support for the series, either; the Index game was a hail-mary that didn't take, the series steward and others responsible for the series retired from Sega and, due to byzantine inter-branch politics (or so I've heard), the existing games can't even be licensed out to other publishers, so even the most hopeful VO dork must know this series is not coming back anytime soon, if ever.

(The PS4 collection's down to ¥1,980 for the next 12 hours or so, btw)


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